THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 

RIVERSIDE 


HEPPLESTALL'S 


By  the  Same  Author 


Novels 

The  Marbeck  Inn 

Fossie   for  Short 

The  Silver  Lining; 

Hobson's.    (With    Charles    Forrest) 

Plays 

Three  Lancashire  Plays 

(The  Game,  The  Northerners,  Zack) 
Hobson's  Choice 
Garside's  Career 
Dealing  in  Futures 
Graft 
The   Odd  Man   Out 

One  Act  Plays 

Lonesome-Like 
The  Price  of  Coal 
Maid  of   France 
The  Doorway 
Spring  in   Bloomsbury 
The  Oak  Settle 


HEPPLESTALL'S 


By 
HAROLD  BRIGHOUSE 


NEW  YORK 
ROBERT  M.  McBRIDE  &  COMPANY 

1922 


Copyright,       1922,      by 
Harold    Brighouse 


\ 


Printed       in       the 
United     States     of     America 


Published,      March,      1922 


CONTENTS 
PART  I 

CHAPTER  PAGB 

I  Reuben's  Seal 3 

II  Smoked    Herring 11 

III  Phoebe  Bradshaw 21 

IV  Almack's  Club 34 

V  Sir    Harry    Woos 45 

VI  The  Man  Who  Won 59 

VII  The  Early  Life  of  John  Bradshaw      .      .  75 

VIII  The  Lonely  Man 87 

IX  The  Spy 102 

X  Dorothy's  Moment 117 

XI  The  Hate  of  the  Hepplestalls     .      .      .  129 

PART  II 

I  The  Service 145 

II  The,  Voice  from  the  Street     .       .       .  161 

III  Mary  Ellen 175 

IV  Mr.    Chown    of   London 186 

V  Hugh  Dakley's  Handiwork       ....  204 
VI  The  Dream  in  Stone 221 

VII  Mary  and  Rupert 237 

VIII  The    Regency 253 

IX  Mary  Arden's  Husband 268 

X  The  Peak  in  Darien 285 

XI  Staithley    Edge 306 


FOREWORD 

T^UMM AGING  at  a  hargain-counter,  I  came  across 
■*  ^  an  object  which  puzzled  me,  and,  turning  to  the 
shopman,  I  asked  him  what  it  was.  He  took  it  up  con- 
temptuously. "That,"  he  said.  "Dear  me,  I  thought 
Vd  put  it  vn  tJie  dust-bin.  It's  fit  for  nothing  but  de- 
struction." "And  you  call  it?"  I  persisted.  "I  call  it 
hy  its  name,"  he  said.  "It's  an  outworn  passion,  and  a 
pretty  frayed  one  too.     Look  at  that!" 

I  watched  him  pull  gently  at  the  passion  and  it  came 
apart  like  mildewed  fabric.  "There's  no  interest  in 
that,"  he  said.  "That  never  led  to  a  murder  or  a  divorce. 
a  feeble  fellow  like  that.  If  it  ever  got  as  far  as  the 
First  Offenders'  Court,  I  shall  be  surprised." 

"Yet  it  looks  old"  I  said.  "In  its  youth,  per- 
haps— " 

He  examined  it  more  closely.  "I  don't  think  it's  a 
love  passion  at  all,"  he  said,  shaking  his  head.  "My 
suppliers  are  getting  very  careless." 

"You  wouldn't  care  to  give  me  their  address?"  I  coaxed. 

He  threw  the  passion  down  angrily.  "This  is  a  shop" 
he  said.  "I'm  here  to  sell,  not  to  make  presents  of  my 
trade  secrets.'* 

I  apologized.  "Of  course,"  I  said,  "I  will  always  deal 
through  you.  And  as  to  this  passion,  what  is  the  price 
of  that?" 

"I'tti  an  honest  man  and  to  tell  you  the  truth  I'd  rather 

put   that  in  the  dust-bin  than  sell  it.     It  goes  against 

ix 


X  FOREWORD 

the  grain  to  he  trading  in  goods  that  I  know  wonH  sat- 
isfyr 

I  said  things  such  as  that  I  wovld  take  the  risk,  that 
I  would  not  hold  him  responsible  for  any  disappointment 
the  passion  might  cause  me  and  I  ended  by  offering  him 
sixpence.  So  taken  was  he  by  the  generosity  of  this  offer 
that  he  not  only  accepted  it,  but  insisted  on  my  taking,  as 
discount,  a  piece  of  newspaper  which,  he  said,  would  serve 
•very  well  to  xvrap  round  the  passion,  pointing  out,  truth- 
fully, that  it  was  a  cleanish  piece  of  paper,  neither  stained, 
by  nor  stinking  of  fried  fish. 

So  we  struck  that  bargain,  and  leaving  the  shop,  which 
I  have  never  found  again,  I  carried  the  passion  home 
and  unwrapped  it  from  the  paper  and  put  it  on  the  table 
in  my  study.  After  a  time,  when  it  was  accustomed  to 
its  new  surroundings,  it  showed  unmistakably  that  it 
wished  to  be  friendly  with  me.  At  its  age,  I  gathered, 
and  in  its  outworn  condition,  it  thought  fit  to  be  grateful 
to  me  for  having  purchased  it  at  so  great  a  price.  The 
shopTTian  was  right;  it  was  not  a  love  passion,  it  was  a 
hate  passion^  but  superannuated  now,  and  if  I  cared  to 
watch  it  carefully  it  promised  that  I  should  see  from  the 
first  all  that  happened :  how  this  hate  which  was  so  very 
strong  a  hundred  years  ago  had  died  and  was  now  turned 
to  such  corruption  and  kindliness  that,  before  it  fell 
utterly  to  pieces,  it  was  to  show  me  its  career.  To  me 
it  seems  that  the  story  of  this  hate  falls,  like  the  hymns, 
into  two  parts,  ancient  and  modem,  and  I  think  it 
properest  to  begin  by  telling  you  the  ancient  part  first. 
Hates  that  are  to  live  a  hundred  years  are  not  born  in  a 
day,  so  I  shall  first  tell  you  how  Reuben  Hepplestall  turned 
from  petty  squire  to  cotton  manufacturing  and  you  wUl 
see  later  for  yourselves  why  this  hate  began. 


HEPPLESTALL'S 


PART  I 


HEPPLESTALL'S 


CHAPTER  I 


eeuben's  seal 


EVEN  to-day  a  man  may  be  a  Jacobite  if  he  likes  to 
be  a  Jacobite  just  as  he  may  read  the  Morning 
Post,  and  in  the  day  when  Reuben  Hepplestall  was  youn^^ 
there  was  a  variety  of  reasons  for  being  Jacobite,  though 
most  of  them  were  romantic  and  sentimental  rather  than 
practical  or  good  sense,  and  Hepplestall's  reason  was 
rank  absurdity  because  it  was  absurdity  unredeemed  by 
conviction.  He  was  Jacobite  because  Sir  Harry  "Whit- 
worth  was  Hanoverian,  from  hatred  of  Sir  Harr}-,  not 
from  love  of  the  Stuarts ;  but  Hepplestall  was  young 
and  as  a  general  principle  perversity  in  3'outh  is  better 
than  perversity  in  age,  leaving  the  longer  time  for  cor- 
rection. 

Certainly,  Hepplestall's  was  a  risky  game,  which  may 
have  had  attractiveness  for  him.  He  was  strong,  even  in 
perversity',  and  having  set  his  hand  to  the  plow,  did  not 
rest  until  he  found  himself  accepted  as  a  power  in  the 
inner  councils  of  the  local  Jacobites ;  but  there  was 
something  nourishing  to  his  self-importance  in  this  furtive 
prominence  and  he  savored  the  hazards  of  it  not  only 
because  it  marked  to  himself  his  difference  from  the  hard 
drinking  sportsmen  of  Sir  Harry's  set,  but  as  a  mental 
exercise.  He  took  a  gambler's  risk  in  a  gambling  age, 
backing  his  vigilance  against  all  comers,  feeling  that  to 
touch  the  fringe  of  intrigue  lifted  him  above  a  societv 


4,  HEPPLESTALL'S 

which  exercised  its  gullet  more  than  its  wits.     His  secret, 
especially  a  dangerous  secret,  flattered  liis  sense  of  superi- 

°"ln*  sober  fact  voung  Hepplestall  was  intellectually  su- 
perior to  his  contemporaries  and,  aware  of  it,  resented 
the  deference  thev  paid  to  Sir  Harry,  the  man  of  acres, 
the  Beau,  the  Corinthian,  the  frequenter  of  White's  and 
Almack's,  leader  unchallenged  of  local  society.     By  his 
clandestine  unorthodoxy,  by  his  perpetual  balancing  on 
a  tight-rope,  he  expressed  to  himself  his   opposition  to 
Sir  Harry ;  and  there  was  Borothy  Vemcrs,  predestined 
in  the  eyes  of  the  county  for  Sir  Harry,  waiting  only  for 
a  questbn  which  would  have  the  force  of  a   command. 
Reuben   had,   in   secret,   his   own  idea   of  the   future   of 
Dorothy   Verners.     He   aspired   where  he  knew   himself 
fitted  to  aspire,  but  the  county  would  have  dissolved  in 
contemptuous   guffaws   at  tlie  thought  of  Reuben   Hep- 
plestall  in   the   character   of    rival   to   Sir   Harry.     He 
brooded  darkly  in  rebellion,  outwardly  accepting  Whit- 
worth's  social  despotism,  inwardly  a  choked  furnace  of 
ambition. 

It  was  little  Bantison  who  involuntarily  played  the 
god  in  the  machine  and  died  that  the  Hepplestalls  might 
be  cotton  lords  in  Lancashire.  Bantison  was  not  pre- 
possessing; a  short  man,  gross  of  body  with  a  face  like 
raw  beef  and  hands  offensively  white,  dressed  in  his  cler- 
ical coat  on  which  spatters  of  snuff  and  stains  of  wine 
smirked  like  a  blasphemy,  endowed  with  fine  capacity  for 
other  people's  Burgundy  and  distinguished  by  an  eye  that 
earned  him,  by  reason  rather  of  alertness  than  deformity, 
the  nickname  of  "Swivel-Eyed  Jack."  Some  vicars,  like 
Goldsmith's,  were  content  with  forty  pounds  a  year;  the 
Reverend  Mr.  Bantison  had  that  limited  stipend  with 
unlimited  desires,  and  contrived  by  the  use  of  his  alert  eye 
and  the  practice  of  discreet  blackmail  to  lead  a  bachelor 


REUBEN'S  SEAL  5 

life  of  reasonable  amplitude.  Not  to  be  nice  about  the 
fellow,  he  was  as  unprincipled  a  wolf  as  ever  masquer- 
aded in  a  sheepskin;  but  he  is  not  to  infest  this  narrative 
for  long-. 

They  were  at  table  at  Sir  Harry  Whitworth's,  who 
dined  at  six  o'clock,  latish,  as  became  a  man  of  fashion. 
There  was  acquiescence  in  that  foible,  but  no  imitation  of 
a  habit  which  was  held  to  be  an  arbitrary  encroachment 
on  the  right  to  drink.  The  ladies  had,  in  strict  mod- 
eration, to  be  treated  civilly — at  any  rate,  the  ladies  had 
to  eat — so  that  Sir  Harry's  guests  rarely  drew  up  to  the 
mahogany  for  the  serious  entertainment  of  the  evening 
before  eight  o'clock,  and  a  man  of  a  position  less  assured 
than  his  would  have  been  suspected  of  meanness  and  too 
great  care  for  the  contents  of  his  cellar.  But  Wliit- 
worth  was  Whitworth  and  they  shrugged  their  shoulders. 
After  all,  with  good  will  and  good  liquor  one  can  achieve 
geniality  in  an  evening  not  beginning  (for  serious  pur- 
poses) until  eight. 

The  ladies  dismissed  to   tea    and   to   whatever  insipid 
joys   the  drawing-room   might   hold,   the  men    addressed 
themselves  with  brisk  resolution  to  the  task  of  doing  noble 
justice  to  the  best  cellar  in  the  county.     They  were  there, 
candidly  and  purposefully,  to  drink,  and  it  was  never  too 
late  to  mend   sobriety,  but  under   Sir  Harry's  roof  the 
process  had   formality   and  the  unbuttoned  rusticity   of 
native  debauchery  must  be  disciplined  to  the  restraint  of 
ordered  toasts.      A  pedantic  host,  this  young  baronet,  but 
his  wines  had  quality,  and  they  submitted  witli  what  pa- 
tience  they    could    summon   to   his    idiosyncrasy.     Tliere 
were  no  laggards  when  Sir  Harry  bid  them  to  his  board. 
Ignoring  the  parson — which,  mostly,  was  what  parsons 
were   for   and   certainly  made   no   breach   of   etiquette — 
Sir  Harry  himself  gave  the  toast  of  "The  King"  with  a 
faintly  challenging  air  habitual  to  him  but  demode.     Lan- 


6  HEPl'LESTALL'S 

cashirc  sentiment  had  veered  since  the  forty-five  and  there 
was  now  no  need,  especially  in  Whitworth's  company,  to 
emj)lmsi/,e  a  loyalty  they  all  shared.  It  was  not  a  fervent 
loyalty  and  no  one  was  expected  to  be  exuberant  about 
the  Hanoverians,  but  bygones  were  bygones,  and  one  took 
the  court  one  found  as  one  took  the  climate. 

But  did  one?  Did  every  one?  Did,  in  especial, 
Reuben  Hepplcstall,  whom  Mr.  Bantison  watched  so  nar- 
rowly as  he  drank  to  the  King?  To  Bantison  the  enig- 
matic was  a  provocation  and  a  hope  and  as  a  specialist 
in  enigmas  he  had  his  private  notion  that  the  whole  of 
Hepplcstall  was  not  apparent  on  the  surface :  he  nursed 
suspicion,  precious  because  marketable  if  confirmed,  that 
here  was  one  who  conserved  the  older  loyalty,  and  he 
watched  as  he  had  watched  before.  Finger-glasses  were 
on  the  table,  but  so  crude  a  confession  of  faith  as  to  pass 
his  wine  over  the  water  was  neither  expected  nor  forth- 
coming and  Hepplest.all's  gesture,  except  that  it  re- 
peated one  which  Bantison  had  noted  mentally  when  "The 
King"  had  been  toasted  on  other  occasions,  was  so  nearly 
imperceptible  as  to  seem  unlikely  to  have  significance. 
But  it  was  a  repetition,  and  did  the  repetition  imply  a 
ritual?  It  was  improbable.  The  risk  was  high,  the  gain 
non-existent,  the  defiance  in  such  company  too  blunt,  the 
whole  idea  of  expressing,  however  subtly,  a  rebellion  in 
a  house  of  loyalists  was  unreasonable.  Still,  as  Reuben 
raised  his  glass,  it  hovered  for  an  instant  in  the  air,  it 
made,  ever  so  slightly,  a  pause  and  (was  it?)  an  obei- 
sance which  seemed  directed  to  his^  fob;  and  when  Mr. 
Bantison  sat  down  he  frowned  meditatively  at  the  pools 
of  mellow  light  reflected  from  the  candles  on  the  table 
and  his  face  puckered  into  evil  wrinkles  till  he  looked  like 
an  obscene  animal  snarling  to  its  spring;  but  that  is  only 
to  say  Mr.  Bantison  was  thinking  unusually  hard. 

He  was  thinking  of  young  men,  their  follies,  their  un- 


REUBEN'S  SEAL  7 

reasoning  audacities  and  how  these  things  happened  by 
the  grace  of  Providence  to  benefit  their  wise  elders.  His 
face  at  its  best,  when  he  was  doing  something  agreeable 
like  savoring  Burgundy  or  (if  so  innocent  an  action  is 
to  be  conceived  of  him)  when  he  smelled  a  violet,  was  a 
mask  of  malice ;  it  was  horrible  now  as  he  weighed  his 
chances  of  dealing  to  his  profit  with  Reuben.  WHiether 
he  was  right  or  wrong  in  his  particular  suspicion,  there 
was  plainly  something  of  the  exceptional  about  this  dark 
young  man.  Hepplestall,  considered  as  prey,  struck  him 
as  a  tough,  tooth-breaking  victim,  and  Mr.  Bantison  had 
not  the  least  desire  to  break  his  teeth.  He  decided  not 
to  hazard  their  soundness — their  whiteness  was  remark- 
able— upon  what  was  still  conjecture.  He  wanted  many 
things  which  money  would  buy,  but  an  orange  already  in 
his  blackmailing  grip  was  yielding  good  juice  and  every 
circumstance  conspired  with  the  excellence  of  Sir  Harry's 
Burgundy  to  persuade  him  to  delay.  His  needs  were  not 
urgent.     And  yet,  and  yet — 

But  it  wasn't  Bantison's  lucky  night.  As  they  sat 
down.  Sir  Harry  cast  a  host's  glance  round  the  table  in 
search  of  a  subject  with  which  to  set  the  conversational 
ball  rolling  again,  and  saw  the  spasm  of  malevolence  which 
marked  Bantison's  face  in  the  moment  of  irresolution. 
"I'gad,"  he  cried  to  the  table  at  large,  "will  you  do  me 
the  favor  to  observe  Bantison?  A  gargoyle  come  to 
meat.  If  it  isn't  the  prettiest  picture  I  ever  saw  of  de- 
votion  incarnate.     Watch  him   meditating  piety.'* 

The  company  gave  tongue  obsequiously,  ready  in  any 
case  to  dance  when  Whitworth  piped,  doubly  ready  in 
the  case  where  a  parson  was  the  butt.  Their  mirth  hap- 
pened inopportunely  for  Bantison,  proving  at  that  crisis 
of  his  indecision,  a  turning  point.  Left  alone,  he  would 
have  remained  passive :  the  taunt  awoke  aggression. 

"I  crave  your  pardon,  Sir  Harry.     I  was  in  thought.'* 


8  HEPPLESTALL'S 

"The  pangs  of  it  gave  your  face  a  woundy  twist.  Out 
with  the  harvest  of  it,  man!  A  musing  that  gave  you 
so  much  travail  should  shed  new  light  on  i^e  kingdom  of 
heaven." 

"I  was  thinking,"  said  Bantison,  "of  a  kingdom  more 
apocryphal;  of  the  kingdom  of  the  Stuarts,"  and  his 
eye,  called  Swivel,  fell  accusingly  on  Hepplestall. 

The  attack  was  sudden,  with  the  advantage  of  sur- 
prise, but  in  that  company  of  slow-moving  brains,  already 
dulled  by  wine,  there  was  none  but  Reuben  who  saw  in 
Bantison's  allusion  and  Bantison's  quick-darting  eye  an 
attack  at  all.  So  far,  the  aifair  was  easy.  "They  have 
their  place,"   said  Reuben  gravely,  "in  history." 

"And — ,"  began  Bantison  combatively,  but  Sir  Harry 
cut  him  short.  "Drown  history,"  he  said,  "and  mend 
your  thoughts,  Bantison.  A  glass  of  wine  with  you." 
Aggression  subsided  in  Bantison ;  he  murmured,  and  felt, 
that  it  was  an  honor  to  drink  with  Sir  Harry.  For  the 
time,  the  incident  was  closed. 

Reuben  pondered  the  case  of  Mr.  Bantison,  worm 
or  adder,  and  admitted  to  disquiet.  This  devil  of  an  un- 
considered parson,  this  Swivel-Eyed  Jack  who  seemed 
good  for  nothing  but  to  suck  up  nourishment,  and  to  be 
the  target  of  contemptuous  and  contemptible  wit,  had 
got  within  his"  guard,  had  plainly  detected  the  meaning 
of  the  obscure  ritual  by  which  he  honored  the  king  over 
the  water  and  mentally  snapped  his  fingers  at  Sir  Harry 
even  while  he  dined  with  him.  And  Reuben  Hepplestall 
did  not  mean  to  forego  tha.t  mental  luxury  of  finger-snap- 
ping at  Sir  Harry.  He  damned  Sir  Ha^rry,  but  damned 
more  heartily  this  unexpected  impediment  to  the  damning 
of  Sir  Harry.  And  if  Bantison  showed  resolution,  so 
much  the  worse  for  him;  of  the  two  it  was  certainly  not 
Reuben  Hepplestall  who  was  coming  to  shipwreck;  and 
how  much  the  worse  it  wasi  for  Bantison  depended  ex- 


REUBEN'S  SEAL  9 

actly  on  that  reverend  gentleman's  movements.  The  first 
move,  at  any  rate,  had  been  a  foolish  one:  it  had  warned 
Reuben. 

The  second  move  was  still  more  foolish:  really,  Mr. 
Bantison's  career  as  a  blackmailer  had  lain  in  rosy  places, 
and  he  grew  careless  through  success.  Besides,  since  Sir 
Harry  had  silenced  him,  forgiven  him,  drunk  with  him, 
Mr.  Bantison,  as  blackmailer,  was  off  duty  and  a  man 
must  have  some  relaxation;  but  Burgundy  plays  the 
deuce  with  discretion  and  was,  all  the  time,  brightening 
his  wits  in  the  same  ratio  as  it  made  him  careless  of 
Hepplestall's  resentment.  An  idea,  that  was  not  at  all 
a  stupid  idea,  but  in  itself  a  dazzling  idea,  came  into  his 
mind,  and  the  glamor  of  it  obscured  any  discretion  the 
Burgundy  might  have  left  him.  Hanging  from  Hep- 
plestall's fob  were  several  seals.  They  interested  Mr. 
Bantison. 

By  this  time  not  a  few  appreciators  of  the  Whitworth 
cellar  had  slid  from  their  chairs  to  the  floor,  and  there 
was  nothing  exceptional  about  that.  For  what  reason 
were  their  chairs  so  well  designed,  so  strongly  made  and 
yet  so  excellently  balanced  but  that  a  man  might  slide 
gently  from  them  without  the  danger  of  a  nasty  jar  to 
his  chin  as  it  hit  the  table?  Chairs  beautiful,  and — 
adapted  to  their  users  when  to  be  drunk  without  shame 
was  a  habit.  Some  one  was  on  the  floor  by  Hepplestall, 
leaving  a  vacant  chair.  Bantison,  obsessed  by  his  idea, 
exaggerated  slightly  a  drunkenness  by  no  means  imag- 
inary, lurched  from  his  seat  on  a  mission  of  discovery 
and  took  the  empty  place  by  Hepplestall.  "What's  the 
hour?"  he  asked. 

Hepplestall  gave  him  his  shoulder,  glanced  at  the  clock 
on  the  wall  behind  him  and  stated  the  time. 

"You  do  not  consult  your  watch,"  said  Bantison. 

"I  have  the  habit,"  said  Hepplestall,  "of  doing  things 


10  HEPPLESTALL'S 

in  my  own  way,"  and  a  soberer  man  than  Bantison  would 
have  taken  warning  at  his  menace.  Mr.  Bantison  was 
either  too  far  gone  to  recognize  the  mettle  of  his  ad- 
versary or  else  he  was  merely  vinous  and  reckless.  With 
his  notable  eye  on  the  seal  which  he  suspected  (rightly) 
to  be,  in  fact,  a  phial  containing  water,  he  made  a  bold 
snatch  at  Hcpplestall's  fob. 

Sir  Harry,  comparatively  sober,  no  partisan  of  Hcp- 
plestall's, but  certainly  none  of  the  vicar's,  saw  the  snatch 
and  rose  with  a  "Good  God,  has  Bantison  taken  to  pick- 
ing pockets?"  but  there  was,  even  at  that  demonstration, 
nothing  like  a  sensation  in  the  room ;  they  were  neutrally 
ready  to  acquiesce  in  picking  pockets,  in  an  outraged 
host,  in  anything.  They  were  country  gentlemen  late  in 
the  evening. 

The  snatch,  ill-timed,  had  failed  of  its  objective.  Mr. 
Bantison  clawed  thin  air  in  ludicrous  perplexity  and  Hep- 
plestall,  assured  by  Sir  Harry's  gesture  of  his  sympathy, 
took  his  opportunity.  He  rose,  with  his  hand  down 
Bantison's  neck,  clutching  cravat,  coat,  all  that  there 
was  to  clutch,  and  with  a  polite:  "You  permit?"  and  a 
bow  to  Whitworth,  carried  the  parson  one-handed  to  the 
window.  Bantison  choked  speechlessly,  imprecations  and 
accusations  alike  smothered  by  the  taut  neck-band  round 
his  throat.  Hepplestall  opened  the  window,  breathing 
heavily,  lifted  the  writhing  sinner  and  dropped  him 
through  it. 

"And  that's  the  end  of  him,"  commented  Sir  Harry, 
more  truly  than  he  knew.  "You're  in  fine  condition,  sir. 
A  glass  of  wine  with  you." 


CHAPTER  II 


SMOKED   HERRING 


THAT  night  ended,  as  the  nights  of  such  gatherings 
were  wont  to  end,  with  some  safely,  others  pre- 
cariously horsed,  others  bundled  unceremoniously  by  Sir 
Harry's  servants  into  coaches  where  their  wives  received 
them  without  disapproval,  and  the  rest  accommodated  on 
the  premises.  The  absence  of  Mr.  Bantison  escaped  their 
notice. 

The  Reverend  and  unregrettcd  Bantison  was  absent 
from  the  leave-taking  because  he  had  already  taken  leave. 
Mr.  Bantison  was  dead.  To  the  sorrow  of  none,  and 
the  satisfaction  of  a  few  who  had  paid  forced  tribute  to 
the  observation  of  his  eye,  Mr.  Bantison  was  dead.  It 
was  agreed  at  the  breakfast  table  that  he  died  of  apo- 
plexy and  a  very  probable  end  too,  though  not  strictly 
in  accordance  with  the  evidence.  Apoplexy  implies  a 
spontaneity  of  termination,  and  Mr.  Bantison's  end  had 
lacked  spontaneity. 

They  were  all  very  heartily  cynical   about  it,  taking 

their  formidable  breakfast  at  Sir  Harry's,  and  no   one 

more  cynical  than  Whitworth.     A  parson  more  or  less, 

what  did  it  matter?     There  was  none  of  that  ovemice 

regard  for  the  sanctity  of  human  life  characteristic  of 

the  late  nineteenth  century,  to  which  the  early  twentieth 

brought  so  drastic  a  corrective;  but  though  they  agreed 

on  their  collective  attitude,  there  was  nothing  to  prevent 

stray  recollections  coming  to  mind  and  the  facts  of  the 

11 


12  HEPPLESTALL'S 

case  were  known  to  more  than  Whitworth  and  Hepple- 
stall.  In  public,  it  was  apoplexy ;  in  the  wrong  privacy  it 
was  still  apoplexy,  but  in  the  right,  there  was  censure 
of  Hepplestall.  True,  the  snuffing-out  of  Bantison  was  no 
more  reprehensible  in  itself  than  the  crushing  of  a  gnat, 
but  who  knew  that  the  habit  of  manslaughter,  once  ac- 
quired, might  not  grow  on  a  man?  It  wasn't  worse  than 
gossip,  and  idle  whisper,  but  the  whisper  reached  Hepple- 
stall and  he  felt  that  it  was  not  good  for  the  man  who 
hoped  to  marry  Dorothy  Vemers  to  be  the  subject  of 
gossip,  however  quiet.  The  gossip  was  more  humorous 
than  malicious,  and  it  was  confined  to  a  circle,  but  that 
circle  was  the  one  which  mattered  and  Reuben  felt  that  in 
his  rivalry  with  Whitworth  he  had  suffered  a  rebuff 
through  the  death  of  Mr.  Bantison.  And  there  was  that 
matter  of  the  Stuarts.  "Curse  the  Stuarts"  was  his  feel- 
ing now  towards  that  charming  race;  he  saw  them,  with 
complete  injustice,  as  first  cause  of  his  eclipse.  Besides, 
if  Bantison  had  detected  him,  there  was  the  possibility  of 
other  open  eyes.  Altogether,  the  symbol  of  his  defiance 
of  Sir  Harry  seemed  ill-chosen  and  the  sooner  he  changed 
it  the  better.  Something,  he  decided,  was  urgently  re- 
quired, not  to  silence  chatter  (for  chatter  in  itself  was 
good,  proclaiming  him  exceptional),  but  to  set  tongues 
wagging  so  briskly  with  the  new  that  they  would  forget 
to  wag  about  the  old.  He  felt  the  need  of  something  to 
play  the  part  of  red  herring  across  the  trail,  and  his  red 
herring  took  the  sufficiently  surprising  shape  of  a  cotton- 
mill. 

It  surprised  and  scandalized  the  landed  gentry,  hia 
friends  of  the  Whitworth  set,  because  the  caste  system 
was  nearly  watertight:  certainly,  of  the  two  chief  divi- 
sions, the  landowners  and  the  rest,  Reuben  belonged  with 
the  first,  while  cotton  spinners  were  rated  low  amongst 
the  rest.     They  were  traders,  of  course,  and  not,  at  that 


SMOKED  HERRING  13 

stage,  individually  rich  traders:  the  master  spinners  were 
spinners  who  had  been  men  and  rose  by  their  own  efforts 
to  the  control  of  other  men.  This  was  the  pastoral  age 
of  cotton,  going  but  not  gone.  It  went,  in  one  sense, 
when  they  harnessed  macliinery  to  water-power,  but  iso- 
lated factories,  on  the  banks  of  tumbling  streams  were 
related  rather  to  the  old  regime  of  the  scattered  cottage 
hand-spinner  and  hand-weaver  than  to  the  coming  era  of 
the  steam-made  cotton  town  with  its  factories  concen- 
trated on  the  coal-fields;  and,  in  the  eyes  of  the  gentry, 
steam  was  the  infamy. 

In  Reuben's,  steam  was  the  ideal :  he  knew  nothing  about 
it,  had  hardly  heard  of  Arkwright  or  Hargreaves,  Kay 
or  Crompton  who,  amongst  them,  made  the  water-power 
factory;  and  Watt  of  the  practicable  steam-engine.  Watt 
who  gave  us  force  and  power,  Watt  the  father  of  indus- 
trial civilization,  the  inventor  who  was  not  responsible  for 
the  uses  others  made  of  his  inventions,  so  let  us  be  equit- 
able to  his  memory,  let  us  not  talk  of  him  as  either  the 
world's  greatest  scapegoat  or  its  most  fruitful  acci- 
dent— Watt  was  almost  news  to  Reuben  Hepplestall  when 
he  met  Martin  Everett  in  Manchester. 

The  meeting  was  fortuitous.  Everett,  an  architect,  one 
of  Arkwright's  men  who  had  quarreled  with  him,  was 
kicking  his  heels  in  the  ante-room  of  a  Manchester  law- 
yer's office  when  Reuben  was  shown  in.  Certainly,  Reu- 
ben was  not  to  be  kept  waiting  by  the  law3^er  as  Everett, 
a  suppliant,  an  applicant  for  capital,  was  likely  to  wait, 
but  the  lawyer  was  engaged  and  the  two  young  men  fell 
to  talking.  Everett,  something  of  a  fanatic  for  steam, 
the  new,  the  unorthodox,  the  insurgent  challenge  to  the 
landed  men,  at  once  struck  fire  on  Hepplestall.  He 
turned  lecturer,  steam's  propagandist,  condemning  water- 
power  as  an  archaism,  and  when  Reuben  admitted  he  had 
come  to  his  lawyer  for  the  very  purpose  of  giving  instnic- 


14  HEPPLESTALL'S 

tions  for  the  sale  of  land  and  the  initiation  of  plans  for 
a  factory  on,  he  suggested,  the  banks  of  a  river,  Everett 
had  small  difficulty  in  converting  liim  to  steam. 

"I  meant  to  bury  Bantison,"  said  Reuben.  "Now  we'll 
boil  him."     Everett  was  puzzled. 

"You  burn  wood  in  your  house,  sir.?"  he  asked. 

"And  coal.     Is  it  to  the  point.?" 

"The  coal  is.     You  get  it — where.?" 

"There  is  a  seam." 

"Then  that  is  the  site  of  your  factory." 

"God !"  said  Hepplestall,  "it  will  be  a  monstrous  sight." 
He  spoke  as  if  that  gladdened  liim. 

"The  building,  sir,  will  have  dignity,"  the  arcliitect  re- 
proved him. 

"Aye.?  But  I'm  thinking  of  the  engine.  The  furnace. 
The  coal.     A  red  herring.?     A  smoked  herring!" 

He  relished  the  thought  again.  By  steam  (Lord,  was 
he  ever  in  the  camp  of  those  fantastical  reactionaries, 
the  Jacobites.?),  by  steam  he  would  symbolize  his  opposi- 
tion to  Whitworth  and  the  Bloods.  He  was  going  into 
trade  and  so  would  be,  anyhow,  ostracized,  but  more  than 
that,  into  steam,  gambling  on  the  new,  the  hardly  tried, 
the  strange  power  that  the  Bloods  had  only  heard  of  to 
deride  it;  going  into  it  blindly,  on  general  hearsay,  and 
the  particular  ipse  dixit  of  a  young  enthusiast  who  might 
be  (except  that  Reuben  trusted  his  insight  and  knew  bet- 
ter) a  charlatan  or  a  deluded  fool ;  and  for  Reuben  there 
was  the  attraction  of  taking  chances,  of  the  impudent, 
audacious  challenge  to  fortune  and  to  the  outraged 
Bloods. 

"Do  you  know,  Everett,"  he  said,  "a  man  might  turn 
atheist  expecting  less  stricture  than  I  expect  who  make 
the  leap  from  land  to  steam."  It  came  into  his  mind  that 
Dorothy  Verners  was  further  off  than  ever  now. 
"Everett,"  he  said,  "extremes  meet.     We'll  call  that  fac- 


SMOKED  HERRING  15 

torj  the  *Dorothy.'  Gad,  if  we  win !  If  we  win !"  He 
gripped  Martin's  hand  with  agonizing  strength  and  went 
into  the  lawyer's  room,  leaving  Everett  to  wonder  what 
sort  of  an  eccentric  he  had  hooked. 

The  lawyer,  who  had  been  asked  by  letter  to  be  pre- 
pared with  advice,  found  all  that  brushed  curtly  aside :  he 
was  to  take  instructions  from  a  client  who  knew  what  he 
wanted,  not  to  minister  to  a  mind  in  doubt,  and  very  def- 
inite and  remarkable  instructions  he  found  them.  "The 
whole  of  your  land  to  be  sold,  excepting  where  the  pres- 
ence of  coal  is,  or  will  be  within  a  week,  known?  And  all 
for  a  steam-driven  factory !  Sir,  I  advised  your  father. 
I  believe  he  trusted  me.  It  is  my  duty  to  warn  vou 
and—" 

"Thankee,  sir,"  Reuben  interrupted  him.  "I  may  tell 
you  I  looked  for  this  from  you,  but  I  don't  appreciate 
it  the  less  because  I  expected  it.  You  advised  my  father, 
you  shall  continue  to  advise  me." 

"That  you  may  do  the  opposite?" 

"No.  That  when  I  go  driving  through  new  country 
I  may  have  a  brake  on  m}'^  wheels." 

"Well  .  .   .   am  I  to  lock  your  wheels  this  time?" 

*'I'm  going  driving,"  said  Reuben  resolutely,  "but  you 
shall  find  me  some  one  to  teach  me  to  handle  the  reins. 
I  must  learn  my  trade,  sir.  Find  me  some  factory  owner 
who  will  sell  me  his  secrets  cheap,  near  my  coal-lands  if 
that's  possible,  that  I  may  watch  Everett  at  work." 

"If  a  Hepplestall  condescends  to  trade,"  said  the  law- 
yer without  conscious  flattery,  "he  will  be  welcomed  by 
the  traders.  There  will  be  no  difficulty  about  that.  In- 
deed you  have  one  on  your  own  land,  Peter  Bradshaw, 
with  a  factory  on  a  stream  of  yours  and  I  believe  he  has 
both  spinning  jennies  and  weaving-looms.  Go  and  hear 
what  Peter  thinks  of  steam." 

"His  disapproval  will  be  a  testimony  to  it.     I'll  see 


16  HEPPLESTALL'S 

Peter,"  said  Reuben,  and  was  away  before  the  lawyer  had 
opportunity  to  voice  the  score  of  stock  arguments  that 
age  keeps  handy  for  the  correction  of  rash  youth.  He 
had  then  the  more  to  say  to  Everett,  the  corrupter,  the 
begetter  in  Reuben  of  his  mad  passion  for  steam,  and 
it's  Httle  satisfaction  he  got  out  of  that.  Young  Everett 
was  to  realize  a  dream,  he  was  to  be  given,  he  thought, 
a  free  hand  to  build  a  steam-driven  factory  as  he  thought 
a  steam-driven  factory  ought  to  be  built,  and  the  prudent 
lawyer's  arguments,  accusations,  menaces,  were  no  more 
to  him  than  the  murmurings  a  man  hears  in  his  sleep  when 
what  he  sees  is  a  vision  splendid:  it  was  only  some  time 
afterwards  that  Everett  woke  up  to  find  in  Hepplestall 
not  the  casual  financier  of  his  dream  in  stone,  but  a  highly 
informed,  critical  collaborator  who  tempered  zeal  for 
steam  with  disciplined  knowledge  and  contributed  as  use- 
fully as  Everett  himself  to  make  the  "Dorothy"  the  finest 
instrument  of  its  day  for  the  manufacture  of  cotton. 

He  got  the  knowledge  chiefly  from  Bradshaw,  partly 
from  others  who  had  carried  manufacture  beyond  the 
narrow  methods  of  Bradshaw's  water-wheel.  It  lay,  this 
primitive  factory,  in  a  gentle  valley  amongst  rounded 
hills  of  gritstone  and  limestone:  a  chilly  country,  lack- 
ing the  warmth  of  the  red  earth  of  the  South,  backward  in 
agriculture,  nourishing  more  oats  than  wheat  and,  in  the 
bleak  uplands,  incapable  of  tillage.  Coarse  grass  fought 
there  with  heather,  but  if  there  was  little  color  on  the 
moors  save  when  the  heather  flowered  in  royal  purple  and 
the  gorse  hung  out  its  flame,  there  was  rich  green  in  the 
valleys  and  the  polish  of  a  humid  atmosphere  on  healthy 
trees.  A  spacious  rolling  country,  swelling  to  hills  which, 
never  spectacular,  were  still  considerable :  a  clean  country 
of  wide  views  and  lambent  distances  in  those  days  before 
the  black  smoke  came  and  seared. 


SMOKED  HERRING  17 

Not  many  miles  away,  sheltered  amongst  old  elms,  was 
Hepplestall's  own  house ;  above  it  the  hill  known  to  be 
coal-bearing,  where  Everett  was  to  build,  on  the  hill  top, 
the  steam-driven  factory,  a  beacon  and  a  challenge  to  the 
old  order.  So,  aptly  to  Reuben's  purpose,  lay  Brad- 
shaw's  factory  and  house,  the  two  in  one  and  the  whole 
as  little  intrusive  on  the  scene  as  a  farmhouse. 

When  he  came  in  that  first  day,  Peter  was  in  the  factory 
and  if  Reuben  had  had  any  doubts  of  making  this  the 
headquarters  of  his  apprenticeship,  the  sight  of  Phoebe 
Bradshaw  would  have  removed  them.  To  one  man  the 
finest  scenery  is  improved  by  a  first-class  hotel  in  the  fore- 
ground; to  another,  a  stiff  task  is  made  tolerable  by  the 
presence,  in  his  background,  of  a  pretty  woman.  Phoebe 
had  prettiness  in  her  linsey-woolsey  gown  with  the  cot- 
ton print  handkerchief  about  her  shoulders  ;  she  was  small 
and  she  was  soft  of  feature.  You  could  not  look  at  her 
face  and  say,  of  this  feature  or  of  that,  that  it  had  shape- 
liness, but  in  a  sort  of  gentle  improvisation,  she  had  her 
placid  charm.  She  sat  at  needlework,  at  something  ob- 
scurely useful,  but  her  pose,  as  he  entered,  was  that  of  a 
lady  at  leisure,  amusing  herself  with  the  counterfeit  of 
toil. 

Bradshaw's  daughter,  had  Bradshaw  not  thrived  and 
lifted  himself  out  of  the  class  of  the  employed,  would  have 
been  in  the  factory,  at  work  like  the  other  girls ;  but  she 
aspired  to  ladyhood  and,  fondly,  he  abetted  her.  He  was 
on  the  up-grade,  and  let  the  fact  be  manifest  in  the  gen- 
tility of  his  daughter !  There  was  pride  in  it,  and  some- 
how there  was  the  payment  of  a  debt  due  to  her  dead 
mother  who  had  worked  at  home  spinning  while  Peter  wove 
the  yam  she  spun  in  a  simpler  day  than  this.  What  the 
late  Mrs.  Bradshaw  would  have  thought  of  a  daughter 
who  aped  the  fine  lady,  or  of  a  father  who  encouraged 


18  HEPPLESTALL'S 

her,  is  not  to  the  point:  Peter  idolized  Phoebe,  and  she 
sat  in  his  house  to  figure  for  Reuben  as  an  unforeseen 
mitigation  in  his  job  of  learning  manufacture. 

He  proceeded  to  address  himself  with  gallantry  to  the 
pleasing  mitigation.  She  rose,  impressed,  at  the  coming 
to  that  house  of  an  authentic  Olympian.  "Pray  be  seated. 
Miss  Bradshaw,"  he  said.  "For  it  is  Miss  Bradshaw.?" 
he  added,  implying  surprise  to  find  her  what  she  was. 

"I  am  Phoebe  Bradshaw,"  she  told  him.  "You  would 
see  my  father.?  He  is  in  the  factory.  Will  you  not  sit 
while  I  go  and  call  him?" 

For  a  man  intent  upon  stem  purpose,  Reuben  felt  re- 
markably unhurried.  "My  business  can  wait,"  he  said, 
gesturing  her  again  to  her  chair.  "It  has  no  such  ur- 
gency that  you  need  disturb  yourself  for  me  and  turn  a 
lady  into  a  message-bearer."  Pie  noted  the  quick  flush 
of  pleasure  which  rose  to  her  cheeks  on  the  word  "lady." 
*'Indeed,"  he  went  on,  "I  find  myself  blame-worthy  and 
unaccountably  a  laggard  that  this  is  the  first  time  I  have 
made  your  acquaintance." 

"Oh!     I  ...  I  am  not  much  in  the  world,  sir." 

"The  world  is  the  loser,  Miss  Bradshaw.  But  it  is  not 
too  late  to  find  a  remedy  for  that.  They  tell  us  the  North 
is  poor  soil  for  flowers  and  with  an  answer  like  you  to 
their  lies  it  would  be  criminal  to  hide  it." 

Crude  flattery,  but  it  hit  the  target.  "I.?  A  flower.? 
Oh,  sir—" 

"Why  call  me  sir?  If  you  were  what — well,  to  be 
frank,  what  I  expected  to  find  you,  a  spinner's  wench,  no 
more  than  that,  why  then  your  sirring  me  would  be  justi- 
fiable.    There  are  social  laws.     I  don't  deny  it." 

"We  have  no  position,"  she  assented. 

*' What's  position  when  there's  beauty?  You  have  that 
which  cuts  across  the  laws.  Beauty,  and  not  rustic 
beauty  either,  but  beauty  that's  been  worked  on  and  re- 


SMOKED  HERRING  19 

fined  ...  I  go  too  fast,  I  say  too  much.  Excuse  a  man 
in  the  heat  of  making  a  discovery  for  being  frank  about 
what  he's  found  and  forget  my  frankness  and  forgive  it. 
I  spoke  only  to  convince  you  that  a  'sir'  from  you  to 
me  is  to  reverse  the  verities." 

"But  you  are  Mr.  Hepplestall?" 

"Then  call  me  so.      I  mount  no  pedestal  for  you." 

Then  Peter  came  in,  and  Hepplestall  retired  his 
thoughts  of  Phoebe  to  some  secondary  brain-cell  that  lay 
becomingly  remote  from  Dorothy  Verners  and  from  his 
immediate  plan  of  picking  up  knowledge  from  Peter. 
The  lawyer  had  heen  right :  there  was  no  question  of 
Peter's  setting  a  price  upon  his  trade  secrets,  he  was 
ravished  b}^  the  interest  his  ground-landlord  was  pleased 
to  take  in  his  little  factory  and  if  he  was  puzzled  to  find 
Hepplestall  intelligent  and  searching  in  his  questions, 
there  was  none  more  pleased  than  Peter  to  answer  with 
painstaking  elaboration.  Once  Reuben  asked,  "Are  there 
not  factories  driven  by  steam?" 

And  Peter  was  wonderfully  shrewd.  "There  are  fools 
in  every  trade,"  he  said,  "hotheads  that  let  wild  fancies 
carry  off  their  commonsense." 

"Steam  is  a  fancy,  then?     It  does  not  work?" 

*'I  have  never  seen  it  work,"  said  Peter,  which  was  true; 
but  he  had  not  gone  to  look  as,  presently,  Reuben  went, 
sucking  up  experience  everywhere  with  a  bee-like  industry. 
Meantime,  he  astonished  Peter  by  proposing  himself  as 
paying  guest  while  he  worked  side  by  side  with  the  men 
and  women  in  the  factory. 

"I  have  the  whim,"  said  Reuben  and  saw  astonishment 
fade  from  Peter's  face.  Thc}^  had  their  whims,  these  gen- 
try, and  indulged  them,  and  if  Hepplestall's  was  the  ec- 
centric one  of  wishing  to  experience  in  his  own  person  the 
life  of  a  factory  hand,  why,  it  wasn't  for  Bradshaw  to 
oppose  him.     And  Peter  smiled  aside  when  Reuben  said 


20  HEPPLESTALL'S 

that  he  would  try  it  for  a  week.  A  week !  A  day  of 
such  toil  would  cure  any  fine  gentleman  of  such  a  caprice. 
But  Peter  was  to  be  surprised  again,  he  was  to  find  Reu- 
ben not  tiring  in  a  day,  nor  in  a  week,  not  to  be  tempted 
from  the  factory  even  by  a  cock-fight  to  which  Peter  and 
half  his  men  went  as  a  matter  of  course,  dropping  the  dis- 
cipline of  hours  and  forgetting  in  a  common  sportsman- 
ship that  they  ranked  as  master  and  man — oh,  those 
gentler  days  before  the  Frankenstein,  macliinery,  quite 
gobbled  up  man  who  made  him! — but  as  time  went  on, 
still,  after  three  months,  working  as  spinner  at  Peter's 
water-driven  jennies  and  becoming  as  highly  skilled  as 
any  man  about  the  place.  Even  when  the  truth  was  out, 
when  most  of  Hepplestall's  acres  had  gone  to  the  ham- 
mer, and  one  could  see  from  Bradshaw's  window  the 
nascent  walls  of  Reuben's  factory,  Peter  was  still  obtuse, 
still  happy  at  the  thought  of  the  honor  done  to  cotton  by 
the  Olympian,  still  blind  to  the  implications  of  the  com- 
ing into  spinning,  so  near  to  him,  of  a  capitalist  on  the 
greater  scale.  He  was  to  be  cured  of  that  blindness,  but 
Avhat,  even  if  he  had  foreseen  the  future  from  the  begin- 
ning, could  he  have  done?  In  the  matter  of  Phoebe,  no 
doubt,  he  could  have  acted,  he  could  have  sent  her  away ; 
but  Hepplestall  in  other  matters  was  not  so  much  mere 
man  as  the  representative  of  steam.  What  could  he  have 
done  to  counter  steam.?  Bradshaw  was  doomed  and 
steam  was  his  undoing,  and,  though  the  particular  instru- 
ment, Hepplestall,  was  to  have,  for  him,  a  peculiar  ma- 
lignancy, the  seeds  of  his  ruin  were  sown  in  his  own  ob- 
stinate conservatism.  He  had  seen  visions  of  a  great 
progress  when  water-power  superseded  arm-power,  but 
his  vision  stopped  short  of  steam.     Peter  was  growing  old. 


CHAPTER  III 


PHOEBE   BRADSHAW 


IF  Hepplestall  calculated  much,  which  Is  a  damnable 
vice  in  youth,  it  is  possibly  some  consolation  to  know 
that  he  miscalculated  the  effect  upon  the  county  of  his 
plunge,  for  at  this  stage  his  eclipse  was  total  and  he  had 
not  anticipated  that.  They  did  not  forget  Bantison  in 
remembering  the  rising  walls  of  his  factory,  and  still  less 
in  the  thought  that  Reuben  who  had  sat  at  their  tables 
was  working  with  his  hands  as  a  spinner.  They  added 
offense  to  offense ;  if  he  was  seen  he  was  cut ;  and  their 
chatter  reached  him  even  at  Bradshaw's  where,  as  he  knew 
very  well,  gentry  talk  must  be  loud  indeed  to  penetrate. 

He  had  overestimated  his  strength  to  resist  public  opin- 
ion. He  was  a  proud  man  and  he  was  outcast  and,  set 
himself  as  he  did  with  ferocious  energy  to  his  task,  he  fell 
short  of  forgetfulness.  Dorothy  Verners  was  at  the  end 
of  a  stony,  tortuous  road;  it  would  be,  at  the  best,  a 
long  time  before  he  reached  the  end  of  that  road  and  the 
chances  that  she  would  still  be  there,  that  Whitworth, 
carelessly  secure  as  he  was,  would  wait  long  enough  to 
leave  her  there  for  Hepplestall,  seemed  to  him,  in  these 
days  of  despondency,  too  remote  for  reason.  He  would 
never  bridge  the  gulf  in  time  and  his  patience  ebbed  away. 
Not  that  he  ever  doubted  that,  in  the  end,  in  money,  posi- 
tion, reputation,  he  would  outdistance  "VVhitworth,  but 
Dorothy  Verners,   as    a  symbol   of  his  ascendancy,  was 

dwindling  to  the  diminished  status  of  an   ambition  now 

21 


22  HEPPLESTALL'S 

seen  to  be  too  sanguine.     He  had  not  realized  how  much 
he  would  be  irked  by  the  contempt  of  the  county. 

If,  at  the  end  of  all,  he  had  them  at  his  feet !  Aye,  so 
he  would,  but  wouldn't  it  be  more  humbling  for  them  if 
they  came  licking,  along  with  his,  the  feet  of  a  wife  of 
his  who  was  not  of  their  order?  Wouldn't  he  so  triumph 
the  more  exultantly?  He  argued  the  case  against  his 
first  intentions,  seeking  justification  for  falling  honestly 
in  love  with  Phoebe  Bradshaw. 

Honest  love  was,  at  first,  very  far  from  his  purpose. 
A  gentleman  didn't  seduce  liis  host's  daughter,  but  that 
rule  of  conduct  postulated  that  the  host  be  equally  a 
gentleman  and  Bradshaw  seemed,  when  Reuben  came,  un- 
fathomably  his  inferior,  and  Bradshaw's  daughter,  for  all 
her  airs,  the  sort  of  flower  hung  by  the  roadside  to  be 
plucked  by  any  grand  seigneur.  Nor  did  he  ever,  at  the 
back  of  his  mind,  move  far  from  that  attitude.  His  tol- 
erant association  with  these  people  was  an  immense  con- 
descension, justified  only  by  ulterior  purpose.  But  if 
marriage  with  Phoebe  fitted  his  purpose,  as  in  his  first 
reaction  from  the  disdain  of  the  county  it  seemed  to  do, 
"why,  then,  though  he  never  thought  of  himself  as  belong- 
ing with  the  manufacturers,  it  might  in  the  long  run  prove 
a  famous  score  against  the  county. 

Phoebe  had  advantages.  She  was  at  hand,  he  saw  her 
every  day  at  meals  and  was  ready  to  believe  that  she  re- 
Tealed  every  day  some  new,  shy  prettiness,  she  was  tract- 
able, malleable  in  the  future  and  his  without  effort  in  the 
present,  and  it  was  comforting  to  think  of  her  softness 
when  all  his  else  was  harsh  endeavor  and  wounded  pride 
and  a  long  stem  struggle  to  success.  Wliile  Dorothy 
Yerncrs  was  of  the  struggle,  3'et  a  man  must  relax  some- 
times, as  Mr.  Bantison  had  thought  when  he  put  Bur- 
gundy before  the  discretion  which  becomes  a  blackmailer. 
Reuben  chewed  upon   it,  not  reconciled  to   surrendering 


PHOEBE  BRADSHAW  23 

Dorothy,  not  quite  convinced  by  the  most  convincing  of 
arguments  he  addressed  to  himself,  unwilling,  even  if  they 
had  convinced,  to  let  go  any  part  of  his  full  scheme,  but 
inclining,  feeling  himself  a  bit  of  a  fool,  a  bit  of  an  apos- 
tate, and  very  much  more  a  prodigy  of  generosity,  to 
look  upon  Phoebe  as  one  whom  he  might  make  his  M-ife. 

Thus  (on  the  whole)  well-intentioned  towards  her,  he 
proposed  one  summer's  morning  to  take  her  out  walking, 
which  was  partly  a  gesture  addressed  to  his  hesitations, 
and  partly  a  deliberate  means  to  a  closer  acquaintance 
than  he  could  compass  indoors  in  the  single  living-room 
where  Peter  hampered  by  too  faithful  attendance  on  his 
pupil.  He  mentioned  his  wish,  a  little  too  grandly,  a 
little  too  much  like  a  royal  command. 

Phoebe  had  her  wisdom  and  the  weeks  of  their  inter- 
course had  rubbed  away  the  first  bloom  of  his  divinity : 
he  ate  like  other  mortals,  and,  like  the  sort  of  mortals 
she  despised  in  her  pose  of  ladyhood,  he  labored  in  the 
factory.  She  had  conceived  ambition  which,  as  he  seemed 
to  level  himself  down  to  her,  looked  not  impossible  to 
realize,  if  she  sustained  in  his  eyes  her  quality  of  lady- 
hood. And  to  go  out  had  its  perils.  She  flowered  in- 
doors and  her  little  graces  withered  in  the  open  air,  when 
she  knew  she  reverted  to  type,  walked  freely  with  great 
strides  and  swung  across  the  moors  like  any  weaver's  lass 
hurrying  to  work.  These  things,  she  thought,  were  dis- 
counts off  her  value:  but  they  might,  just  possibly,  be  a 
winning  card.  They  might  announce  that  she  had 
variety. 

"To  walk,"  she  said,  "with  you?" 

"Oh,  not  too  far  for  a  lady,"  he  assured  her,  "and  not 
too  fast." 

"You,"  she  retorted,  "ride  too  much.  Pll  walk  yom 
off  your  legs."     So  she  challenged  him,  with  wisdom. 

If  they  were  to  make  a  walking  match  of  it,  at  least 


24  HEPPLESTALL'S 

thej  were  not  to  be  philanderers,  they  were  not  going  out 
only  as  far  as  the  first  heather,  there  to  sit  together  in  a 
solitude  that  might  spell  danger.  And  she  announced 
spirit  to  a  man  who  would  (she  knew)  appreciate  it,  she 
declared  that  if  her  inches  were  iew  they  had  vigor,  that 
if  she  had  ladyhood  it  was  skin-deep,  that  she  wasn't  a 
one-volume  abridgment  of  imbecility,  not  his  for  the 
beckoning;  and  she  went  defianth',  to  put  on  a  bonnet  and 
a  shawl  which  would  have  been  a  \'iolent  and  successful 
assault  on  any  complexion  less  admirable  than  hers.  She 
was,  indeed,  placing  her  gambling  card. 

And,  to  his  surprise,  he  liked  it.  This,  if  it  were  not 
mere  flicker,  if  it  were  not  instinctive  counterfeiting  of  a 
feminine  move  in  a  sex-game,  was  a  spirit  which  would 
serve  her  well,  and  him  too,  in  the  drawing-rooms  of  the 
county  in  the  future  he  was  contemplating  for  them  both. 
Wasn't  it  fact  that  my  Lord  Montacute  had  married  his 
cook  and  that  she  had  made  him  a  notable  Lady.''  And 
he  wasn't  a  lord  nor  Phoebe  a  cook. 

Small  Phoebe  kept  her  promise,  too.  She  came  of 
hardy  stock,  and  she  hadn't  spent  the  day,  as  he  had, 
standing  at  a  spinning- jenny.  He  had  to  cry  her  mercy, 
flinging  himself  exhausted  on  the  heather. 

"I  said  3'ou  ride  too  much,"  she  exulted,  secure  that  he 
did  not  feign  fatigue,  standing  over  him  while  the  blood 
raced  happily  through  tingling  limbs. 

"And  you,"  he  retorted,  "too  little." 

"I?  I  do  not  ride  at  all.  You  know  we  have  no 
horses." 

**It  will  be  necessary  for  you  to  ride,"  he  said. 

"Why  so.?"  she  asked  him.  "Haven't  I  proved  that  I 
can  walk.?" 

"Still,"  he  said,  "I  shall  have  horses  brought  to- 
morrow.    Will  you  have  me  for  riding  master?" 

"To  ride  I  should  need  a  habit." 


PHOEBE  BRADSHAW  25 

«'Which  I  provide." 

She  held  her  breath.  For  what  was  it  "necessary"  for 
her  to  ride  if  not  that  he  was  thinking  of  a  future  for 
her  that  jumped  giddily  with  her  ambition.''  Still,  she 
kept  her  head;  still,  she  sensed  the  value  of  offering  this 
man  persistent  opposition,  and  all  she  said  was  "Are  you 
rested  now.''" 

He  rose,  to  find  himself  aware  of  strange  tremblings, 
not  to  be  accounted  for  by  tiredness,  of  a  dampness  on 
his  brow,  and,  when  he  spoke,  of  a  thickened  voice.  "You 
shall  have  the  habit  to-morrow,"  he  promised  her. 

"They  burned  warlocks  once,"  she  mocked  him.  A 
warlock  is  a  wizard.  "Habits  do  not  come  in  a  day  ex- 
cept by  magic." 

"Yours  will  come  by  road,  from  Manchester.  I  ride 
in  for  it  to-morrow." 

*'Neglecting  3-our  work?" 

"I  choose  my  work,"  he  said,  and  strode  off,  leaving  her 
to  follow  as  she  might,  but  if  he  thought  to  outdistance 
her,  he  reckoned  without  the  grit  of  Phoebe.  As  a  lady, 
he  could  find  a  dozen  chinks  a  day  in  her  Brummagen 
armor;  as  a  country  lass  she  had  a  native  energy  that  all 
her  vanities  left  unimpaired,  and  set  what  hot  pace  he 
could,  she  kept  level  with  him  like  a  taunt  which  refuses  to 
stop  ringing  in  a  man's  ears.  If  this  was  a  duel,  Phoebe 
was  scoring  winning  points  that  night.  "But  a  horse 
will  test  your  mettle,  my  wench,"  he  was  thinking  sav- 
agely, and  with  relief  that  the  idea  of  a  horse  had  come 
to  him. 

*'When  I  go  driving  through  new  country,"  he  had 
told  the  lawyer,  "I  like  a  brake  on  my  wheels,"  and  he 
was  feeling  very  urgently  the  need  of  a  brake  on  his 
wheels  in  the  new  country  through  which  he  suddenly  dis- 
covered himself  to  be  driving  now.  He  put  it  to  him- 
self  in   phrases   that   may   or   may  not   be   paradoxical. 


26  HEPPLESTALL'S 

"Damn  her,  I  love  her,"  he  said  aloud  as  he  undressed 
that  night. 

Phoebe,  in  her  room  across  the  passage,  mingled  fear 
with  triumph.  If  one  is  not  born  to  horses,  horses  ter- 
rify. In  that,  more  than  in  anything  else,  lay  the  dif- 
ference between  Phoebe's  world  and  Reuben's.  If  her 
ladyhood  was  pretentious  and  calculated  instead  of  in- 
stinctive, well,  theirs  did  not  go  very  deep  either.  There 
was  culture  in  that  age,  but  not,  extensively,  in  Lanca- 
shire. Culture  hugged  the  capital,  throwing  outposts  in 
the  great  houses  of  the  Home  Counties.  In  Manchester 
itself  there  were  bookish  people,  but  in  the  county  sport 
was  the  touchstone,  and  if  horsemanship  in  the  skilled 
sense  was  not  expected  of  a  woman,  she  must  at  any  rate 
be  not  shy  of  a  horse.     It  was  almost  the  test  of  gentry. 

When  the  thought  came  to  him  as  he  panted  on  the 
heather  it  had  not,  indeed,  been  as  a  test  of  her  quality. 
At  first,  he  was  more  generous  than  that.  To  be  his 
wife,  she  must  ride;  she  did  not  ride;  and  he  must  teach 
her.  Only  later  did  he  see  it  as  a  trial  of  her  fitness,  as 
she,  at  once,  saw  it,  gathering  courage  for  an  ordeal. 
If  she  must  ride  to  win  this  husband,  then,  cost  what  it 
might,  she  would  ride. 

He  kept  his  word,  taking  for  the  first  time  a  full  day 
off  from  his  education  as  a  spinner,  demanded  measure- 
ments of  her  at  breakfast,  rode  with  them  into  Man- 
chester, was  back  by  early  evening  with  a  habit  and,  from 
his  stables,  a  horse  used  to  a  side-saddle:  doing  all  with 
characteristic  concentration  of  energy  that  brooked  no 
opposition  from  any  such  bombastical  pleader  for  delay 
as  the  outraged  habit-maker. 

Hepplestall  commanded,  and  Hepplestall  received. 

There  are  degrees  in  habits?  Then  this  was  a  habit  of 
high  degree.  Whether  it  was  a  lover's  free-handed  gift 
or  the  circumstance  of  a  trial  by  ordeal,  it  was  the  best 


PHOEBE  BRADSHAW  27 

it  could  be,  and  Phoebe's  prettiness  was  equal  to  it.  In- 
deed, she  trended  by  choice  to  a  fluffiness  of  dress  and  a 
cheapness  in  taste  that  Reuben,  who  was  not  fastidious, 
had  not  failed  to  note.  You  have  seen,  perhaps,  a  mod- 
ern hospital  nurse  in  uniform  and  tlie  same  nurse  in 
mufti?  That  was  the  difference  between  Phoebe  in  her 
habit  and  Phoebe  as  he  had  seen  her  hitherto.  More  than 
ever,  he  felt  conviction  that  no  ill-judged  passion  was 
leading  him  astray,  that  here,  when  good  dressmakers  had 
clothed  her,  was  his  match  and  the  match  for  the  county. 
He  tried  to  be  skeptical,  to  criticize,  and  found,  at  the 
end  of  a  scrutiny  too  frank  to  be  well-mannered,  that 
there  was  nothing  here  to  criticize. 

She  smiled,  bravely,  aware  from  her  glass  that  what 
he  saw  was  good,  aware  that  he  could  not  see  how  big 
a  thing  her  horse  appeared  to  her,  how  far  above  the 
ground  the  saddle  was,  how  shrunken  small  she  felt.  But 
it  was  consoling  to  know  that  if  she  was  going  to  break 
her  neck,  she  was  to  do  it  in  the  finest  clothes  she  had 
ever  worn.      His  look  of  candid  admiration  was  a  tonic. 

"This  is  your  horse,"  he  said.  "We  called  him  Hec- 
tor." She  made  Hector's  acquaintance  prettily,  but, 
plainly,  she  missed  his  point,  and  he  made  it  more  def- 
initely. "Of  course,  you  may  rename  him  now  that  he  is 
your  own." 

"Mine?     My  horse?     But,  Mr.  Hepplestall— " 

"Have  you  your  salts?"  he  asked,  cutting  short  her 
cry  of  surprise.  A  horse  more  or  less,  he  would  have  her 
think,  was  triviality  when  Reuben  Hepplestall  was  in  the 
mood  to  give. 

"Salts?"  she  repeated,  puzzled. 

"In  case  you  swoon,"  he  said  gravely,  and  not  ironi- 
cally either.      It  was  the  swooning  age. 

But  not  for  Phoebe.  Did  ladies  swoon  at  a  first  riding- 
lesson?     She  doubted  it:  they  took  that  lesson  young,  as 


28  HEPPLESTALL'S 

children,  in  the  years  before  they  were  modish  and  swoon- 
ing, and,  in  any  case,  it  wasn't  her  ladyhood  that  was  in 
question  now;  it  was  her  courage.  "I  shall  not  swoon," 
she  said,  and  he  relished  the  bravado  of  it. 

Spirit?  Aye,  she  had  spirit  to  be  wife  of  his,  and  it 
behoved  him  not  to  break  it.  If  he  had  had  thoughts, 
brutally,  of  making  this  test  of  her  as  harsh  as  he  could, 
that  was  all  altered  now  by  the  sight  of  her  adorning  the 
habit  instead  of  overwhelmed  by  it,  caressing  Hector  in- 
stead of  shrinking  from  him,  and  he  saw  tenderness  as 
the  prime  virtue  of  a  riding-master.  She  wasn't  going 
to  take  a  fall  if  he  could  prevent  it. 

Between  them,  between  Reuben  and  Hector,  a  sober 
animal  who  had  carried  Reuben's  mother  and  hadn't  for- 
gotten his  manners  in  the  years  since  her  death,  and  be- 
tween these  two  and  Phoebe's  pluck,  they  managed  a  les- 
son which  gave  her  confidence  for  later  lessons  when  the 
instructor's  mood  was  less  indulgent.  Reuben  hadn't 
tenderness  as  a  habit.  Neither  had  she  very  staunchly 
the  habit  of  courage,  but  all  the  courage  she  had  was 
wrought  up  for  these  occasions  and,  thanks  to  the  so- 
briety of  the  good  Hector,  it  served.  She  took  a  toss 
one  day,  but  fell  softly  into  heather  and  rose  smiling  be- 
fore he  had  leaped  to  the  ground.  His  last  doubts  that  he 
loved  her  fled  when  she  smiled  that  day.  *'  'Fore  Gad,"  he 
cried,  **you're  thoroughbred."  It  was  the  sweetest 
praise. 

That  was  a  moment  of  supreme  exaltation,  but,  all  the 
time,  Phoebe  was  living  now  in  upper  air.  For  her,  mani- 
festly and  openly  for  her,  he  was  neglecting  what  had 
seemed  the  only  thing  he  lived  for;  he  spent  long  days 
riding  with  Phoebe  instead  of  laboring  to  learn  in  the 
factory.  Once  or  twice  when  he  had  the  opportunity  of 
inspecting  some  steam-driven  works  not  too  remote,  he 
took  her  with  him,  leaving  her  in  state  obsequiously  served 


PHOEBE  BRADSHxWV  29 

in  an  inn  while  he  studied  the  engine-house  and  the  driv- 
ing bands  and  the  power-looms  of  the  factory,  refusing 
the  manufacturer's  invitation  to  dinner  and  offending  a 
host  to  come  back  where  she  waited  for  him  at  the  inn. 
Peter  might  croak,  and  Peter  did  croak  like  any  raven 
and  shake  his  head,  and  Peter  was  told  he  was  old-fash- 
ioned, and  was  put  in  his  place  as  parents  have  always 
been  put  in  their  place  when  young  love  takes  the  bit 
between  its  teeth.  Hepplestall,  and  his  lass.''  It  was  a 
piece  of  luck  too  rare  to  be  true.  He  prophesied  sad 
fate  for  her,  he  wished  she  had  a  mother — men  are  handi- 
capped— he  spoke  of  sending  for  her  aunt:  all  the  time, 
too  overawed  by  Hepplestall's  significance  to  be  more 
effective  as  an  obstacle  than  a  cork  bobbing  on  the  sur- 
face of  a  flood.  Protest  to  Reuben  himself,  or  even  ap- 
peal, was  sheer  impossibility  for  Bradshaw,  who  was  al- 
most feudal  in  his  subservience  to  gentry.  He  saw  dan- 
ger, warned  Phoebe,  was  laughed  at  for  his  pains  and 
turned  fatalist.  Phoebe  cared  for  neither  his  spoken 
forebodings  nor  his  morose  resignation.  Phoebe  was 
happy,  she  tasted  victory,  she  was  sure  of  Reuben  now 
and  so  sure  that  she  began  to  look  be3'ond  the  fact  that 
she  had  got  him  and  was  holding  him,  she  began  to  con- 
cede herself  the  luxury  of  loving  him. 

Phoebe  was  a  sprinter,  capable  of  effort  if  the  effort 
need  not  be  sustained.  She  had  attracted  Reuben,  and 
in  the  doing  it  had  submitted  to  severe  self-discipline,  to 
a  vigilance  and  a  courage  which  went  beyond  those  of 
the  normal  Phoebe,  Accomplishment  went  to  her  head 
like  wine;  she  wasn't  prudent  Phoebe  on  a  day  when,  as 
their  horses  were  at  the  door,  a  message  came  from 
Everett  asking  Reuben  to  go  at  once  to  discuss  some  de- 
tail of  equipment  of  the  now  nearly  completed  factory. 
She  wasn't  prudent  or  she  would  never  have  taken  such 
an  occasion  to  plead  that  he  had  promised  her  that  day 


'30  HEPPLESTALL'S 

for  riding.  She  knew  what  his  factory  meant  to  him, 
knew,  too,  how  jealous  he  was  of  his  hard-won  knowledge, 
how  keen  to  match  it  against  Everett's  older  experience; 
jet  she  asked  him  to  imply,  by  keeping  a  promise  to  ride, 
that  she  came  before  the  factory.  And  he  loved  her. 
Whatever  the  depth  of  his  love,  whatever  the  chances  that 
this  was  the  love  that  lasts,  he  loved  her  then.  *'TelI 
Mr.  Everett,"  he  said  to  the  messenger,  "that  I  authorize 
him  to  use  his  own  judgment." 

Which  Everett  very  gladly  did,  promptly  and,  he 
thought,  irremediably.  It  was  a  point  on  which  he  had 
his  own  ideas,  differing  from  Reuben's,  and  carte  blanche 
at  this  stage,  after  the  endless  controversies,  of  Reuben's 
obstinate  collaboration,  was  a  godsend  that  Everett 
wasn't  going  to  throw  away  by  being  dilatory. 

It  resulted  that  when  Reuben  next  visited  the  works, 
he  was  confronted  by  a  fait  accompli,  and  by  Everett's 
hardly  concealed  smirk  of  glee.  "The  thing,  as  you  see, 
is  done  now.  I  had  your  authority  to  do  as  I  thought 
best,"  said  Everett. 

"Then  undo  and  re-do,"  said  Reuben,  sourly. 

"Pull  down !"  gasped  Everett.     "But—" 

"You  heard  me,"  growled  Reuben,  turning  on  his  heel 
from  a  disgruntled  architect  who  had  been  too  previous 
with  self-congratulations  on  getting  his  own  way  for 
once. 

And  Phoebe  was  triumphing  at  home,  secure  of  her 
Reuben,  in  ecstasy  at  her  tested  power  over  him. 

Reuben,  too,  was  thinking  of  that  power,  of  how  he 
had  yielded  to  it,  of  Samson  and  Delilah  and  of  the  dry- 
rot  that  sets  in  in  a  man's  strength  when  he  delivers  his 
will  into  a  woman's  keeping.  It  was  a  dark,  inscrutable 
Reuben  who  came  home  that  night  to  Bradshaw's ;  beyond 
Phoebe's  skill  to  smooth  away  the  irritation  furrows  from 
that  brow.     She  used  her   artless   remedy ;  she  fed  him 


PHOEBE  BRADSHAW  31 

well,  and  persuaded  herself  that  no  more  was  wrong  than 
that  he  came  in  hungry.  He  was  watching  her  that  night 
with  critical  eyes  and  she  was  aware  of  nothing  but  that 
his  gaze  never  left  her:  its  fidelity  rejoiced  her. 

He  flung  himself  vigorously  at  work,  after  that. 
There  was  woman,  a  snare,  and  work,  the  sane  alterna- 
tive, there  was  the  zest  of  it,  the  mere  exercise  of  it  to 
sweat  evil  humors  out  of  a  man.  By  now  he  knew  all 
that  Bradshaw's  factory  could  teach  him,  and,  by  his  in- 
spections of  modern  factories,  much  more;  but  his  own 
place  was  not  quite  ready,  his  organization  was  complete 
on  paper  and  till  the  day  came  for  applying  his  knowl- 
edge, time  had  to  be  filled  somehow  and  as  well  at  Brad- 
shaw's as  anywhere  else.  Phoebe  found  herself  neglected. 
He  did  not  ride,  or,  if  he  did,  it  was  alone.  It  came  to 
her  that  she  had  made  too  sure  of  him ;  he  hadn't  men- 
tioned marriage,  he  was  drifting  from  her.  What  could 
she  do  to  bind  him  to  her? 

Then  he  relented.  She  was  suffering  and  he  thought, 
in  a  tender  mood,  that  it  hurt  him  to  see  her  suffer. 
Wasn't  he  making  a  mountain  of  a  molehill,  wasn't  he  un- 
just to  blame  her  for  the  consequences  of  his  weakness? 
He  was  a  most  chivalrous  gentleman  when  he  next  in- 
vited her  to  ride  with  him,  and  she  accepted,  meekly. 
There  lay  the  difference  between  the  then  and  the  now. 
Then  they  were  comrades,  now  he  condescended  and  he 
did  not  know  it.  But  it  was  still  his  thought  that  Phoebe 
was  to  be  his  wife,  and  in  the  comfortable  glow  of  for- 
giveness, in  horse-exercise  on  a  pleasant  afternoon  with 
one  whose  complexion  was  proof  against  any  high  light, 
who  was  a  plucky  rider  and  his  accustomed  fellow  on  these 
rides,  they  achieved  again  a  genuine  companionship. 
His  doubts  and  her  fears  alike  dissolved  in  what  seemed 
the  mellowed  infallibility  of  that  perfect  afternoon. 

Two  other  riders  came  in  sight,  meeting  them,  along 


32  HEPPLESTALL'S 

the  road — a  lady,  followed  by  her  groom.  Dorothy 
Vemers  sitting  her  horse  as  if  she  had  been  cradled  on  it, 
straight,  tall  Dorothy  whose  beauty  was  so  different  from 
Phoebe's  soft  prettiness.  Dorothy  had  beauty  like  a 
birthright.  She  came  of  generations  of  women  whose 
first  duty  was  to  be  admirable,  who  had,  as  it  were,  ex- 
perimented long  ago  with  beauty  and  had  fixed  its  lines 
for  their  successors.  Wliere  Phoebe  suggested  a  hasty 
improvisation  of  comeliness,  where,  in  her,  comeliness  was 
unexpected  and  almost  an  impertinence,  in  Dorothy  it 
was  authentic  and  assured. 

Had  Reuben,  seeing  Phoebe  in  the  magic  vision  of  his 
love,  called  her  a  thoroughbred  because  she  took  a  fall 
without  blubbering?  It  was  a  compliment,  and  he  had 
meant  it.  He  had  meant  it  because  she  had,  surpris- 
ingly, not  flinched.  But  of  the  real  thoroughbreds,  of 
those  who  were,  without  compliment,  thoroughbred,  one 
would  take  for  granted  that  they  did  not  flinch  and  the 
surprise  would  be  not  that  they  did  not  flinch,  but  if  they 
did.  He  had  not  been  seeing  Dorothy  Verners  lately;  he 
had  been  forgetting  her  authenticit}' ;  and  he  hadn't  the 
slightest  doubt,  watching  her  approach,  that  he  belonged 
with  her  order,  that  he  was  an  aristocrat  who,  if  he 
stooped  to  trade,  stooped  only  to  rise  again.  He  saw 
himself  through  his  own  eyes. 

And  Dorothy  looked  at  him  through  hers,  seeing  a 
dark  man,  not  unhandsome,  who  was  of  good  stock,  but 
a  nonentity  until  he  had  brought  unpleasant  notoriet}^ 
upon  himself  by  too  summary  a  method  of  dealing  with 
Mr.  Bantison  and,  after  that,  had  stepped  down  to  asso- 
ciation with  the  manufacturers.  No  doubt  it  was  a 
manufacturer's  daughter  with  whom  he  took  his  ride. 
Some  of  them  she  had  heard,  upstarts,  did  ride.  A  man 
who  had  lost  caste,  a  man  to  be  ignored.  Would  it  hurt 
him  to  be,  emphatically,  ignored  by  her.'*     He  deserved  to 


PHOEBE  BRADSHAW  33 

be  hurt,  but  probably  his  skin  was  thick  and,  in  any  case, 
why  was  she  wasting  thought  on  him?  He  was  cut  by 
the  county:  she  had  not  to  create  a  precedent.  She  did 
what  she  knew  others  did.  She  cut  him  dead,  and  it 
came,  unreasonably,  as  a  shock  to  Hepplestall. 

He  was  used  to  the  cut  direct,  he  didn't  even  tighten 
his  lips  now  when  one  of  his  former  acquaintance  passed 
him  by  without  a  glance.  But  he  hadn't  anticipated  this, 
he  hadn't  included  Dorothy,  and  her  contempt  struck  at 
him  like  a  blow.  It  wasn't  what  Dorothy  stood  for,  it 
wasn't  that  she  was  the  reigning  toast,  and  that  to  carry 
her  off  was  to  have  been  his  splendid  score  off  Whitworth. 
It  was,  simply,  that  she  was  the  one  woman,  and,  yes,  he 
admitted  her  right  to  be  contemptuous ;  he  had  permitted 
her  to  see  him  in  demeaning  company.  He  looked  at 
Phoebe  with  intolerable  hatred  in  his  eyes,  he  could  have 
found  satisfaction  in  lashing  her  with  liis  whip  till  he  was 
exhausted.     Well,  he  didn't  do  that. 

But  Phoebe  comprehended  something  of  his  thought. 
She  tried — God  knows  she  tried — to  win  him  back  to  her 
as  they  rode  home.  She  chattered  gayly,  keeping  it  up 
bravely  while  jealousy  and  fear  gnawed  her  heart,  and 
Hepplestall  stared  glumly  straight  ahead  with  never  a 
word  for  Phoebe.  Her  words  were  like  sea  foam  break- 
ing idly  on  granite. 

Words  didn't  do.  Then,  what  would?  Desperately, 
she  came  to  her  decision.  He  was  slipping  from  her,  there 
was  wreck,  but  there  was  still  the  possibility  of  rescue. 
When  she  said  "Good  night,"  there  was  invitation  in  her 
eye;  and  something,  not  love,  took  him,  later,  across  the 
passage  to  her  room.  Phoebe's  last  gambling  card  was 
played. 


CHAPTER  IV 


almack's  club 


MR.  LUKE  VERNERS  put  on  his  boots  in  his  lodg- 
ing in  Albemarle  Street,  St.  James,  in  a  very  evil 
mood.  He  was  in  London,  and  ordinarily  liked  to  be  in 
London  although  it  was  a  place  where  a  man  must  re- 
member his  manners,  where  he  wasn't  a  cock  crowing  on 
his  dung-hill,  but  a  mighty  small  atom  in  a  mighty  big 
crowd;  but  London  with  his  wife  and  his  daughter  was 
a  cruel  paradox.  Wh}'  the  plague  did  a  man  cramp  his 
legs  in  a  coach  for  all  those  miles  from  Lancashire  to 
London  if  it  wasn't  to  get  away  from  wife  and  daughter.'* 
And  here  he  was  tied  to  the  family  petticoats,  in  London. 
It  was  enough  to  put  any  man  into  bad  temper. 

As  a  rule,  Mr.  Verners  was  a  tolerant  person.  In  a 
squat  little  volume  published  in  the  3'ear  1822  and  called 
*'A  Man  of  the  World's  Dictionary,"  a  Virtuous  Man  is 
defined  as  "a  being  almost  imaginary.  A  name  given  to 
him  who  has  the  art  of  concealing  his  vices  and  shutting 
his  eyes  to  those  of  others,"  and  so  long  as  the  vices  of 
others  did  not  interfere  with  his  own,  and  so  long  as  the 
others  were  of  his  own  order,  Mr.  Verners  was  a  candidate 
for  virtue,  under  this  definition.  But  the  man  born  to 
be  a  perfect  individualist  is  at  a  disadvantage  when  he 
owns  an  estate  and  feels  bound  by  duty  to  marry  and  be- 
get an  heir:  it  isn't  the  moderns  who  discovered  that  mar- 
riage clogs  selfishness. 

Mr.  Verners  had  an  heir,  but  not,  as  it  happened,  till 

34 


ALMACK'S  CLUB  35 

Dorothy  had  come  first.  If  she  hadn't  come  first,  she 
would  not  have  come  at  all ;  but  she  came,  and  dazzlingly, 
and  if  there  is  something  agreeable  in  being  the  father 
of  a  beauty,  there  is  also  something  harassing.  A  wife, 
after  all,  is  only  a  wife,  but  with  a  monstrous  fine  lady 
of  a  daughter  about  the  house  a  man  has  to  mind  his  p's 
and  q*s.  Mr.  Verners  was  a  sort  of  a  gentleman  and  he 
minded  his  p's  and  q's,  but  he  wasn't  above  admitting  that 
he  looked  forward  to  the  day  when,  Dorothy  well  and 
truly  married,  he  could  relax  to  reasonable  carelessness 
at  home. 

And  not  only  did  Dorothy  not  get  married,  not  only 
did  Whitworth  procrastinate  and  play  card  games  in  Lon- 
don instead  of  the  love-game  in  Lancashire,  but  Dorothy, 
instead  of  waiting  patiently,  became  strangely  restive. 
The  queer  thing  is  that  her  discontent  began  to  show 
itself  soon  after  she  had  met  Reuben  Hepplestall  riding 
in  the  road  one  day  now  a  year  ago.  She  hadn't  men- 
tioned the  meeting  at  home.  Why  should  she  mention  a 
creature  who  was  outcast.''  Why  give  him  a  second 
thought?  What  possible  connection  could  there  be  be- 
tween the  meeting  and  this  change  in  her  hitherto  entirely 
submissive  habit  of  waiting  for  Whitworth.''  None,  to 
be  sure,  and  no  doubt  Luke  was  perfectly  right  when  he 
said  it  was  all  the  vapors. 

"But  the  vapors,"  said  Mrs.  Verners,  "come  from  Sir 
Harry's  absence." 

And  "Tush,"  said  Mr.  Verners,  who  was  not  without 
his  envious  sympathy  of  that  rich  bachelor  in  London, 
and  there,  for  that  time,  they  left  it. 

But  the  vapors  came  again,  they  turned  endemic  while 
Sir  Harry  continued  a  parishioner  of  St.  James',  a  gay 
absentee  from  his  estates  and  his  plain  duty  of  marrying 
Dorothy,  and  Mr.  Verners'  sympathy  wore  thin.  A  toler- 
ant man,  but  a  daughter  who  (he  held)  moped  and  a  wife 


36  HEPPLESTALL'S 

who  (he  told  her  in  set  terms)  nagged,  played  the  deuce 
with  his  tolerance  and  so,  finally,  against  his  better  judg- 
ment, they  were  come  to  London,  "To  dig  the  fox  out  of 
his  earth,"  he  said.  "Aye,  but  do  you  fancy  the  fox  will 
relish  it?" 

He  knew  how  he,  in  the  character  of  fox,  would  have 
received  this  hunt.  "But  we  come  naturally  to  London, 
for  clothes  for  Dorothy  and  me,"  said  Mrs.  Vemers. 

"Do  we?"  he  growled.  "It's  heads  I  win  and  tails  you 
lose  every  time  with  a  woman.  What  the  hangment  do 
I  get  except  an  empty  purse?" 

If  the  gods  smiled,  he  got  rid  of  Dorothy,  but  that 
wasn't  to  be  emphasized  now  any  more  than  was  his  very 
firm  intention  to  spend  on  himself  the  lion's  share  of  the 
contents  of  that  purse.  These  things  were  not  to  be 
mentioned  because  it  was  good  to  have  a  grievance  against 
his  wife,  to  throw  responsibility  for  their  enterprise  on 
her  shoulders,  to  seem  wholly,  when  he  was  only  half,  con- 
vinced that  they  were  doing  an  unwise  thing. 

"Dorothy  must  come  to  London  sometimes,"  said  Mrs. 
Verners  placidly,  "and  Sir  Harry  is  hardly  to  be  re- 
minded by  letter  of  his  negligence,  whereas  the  sight  of 
Dorothy—" 

"Well,  well,"  said  Luke,  "you're  proud  of  your  pop- 
pet." Secretly,  he  would  have  backed  the  looks  of  his 
daughter  against  those  of  any  woman  in  the  land. 
*'But,"  he  went  on,  "we're  in  London  now,  and  London's 
full  of  pretty  women.  Your  wench  may  be  the  pride  of 
Lancashire,  but  you're  pitting  her  here  against  the  full 
field  of  the  country — " 

"Mr.  Vemers,  you  are  vulgar." 

"I'm  stating  facts,"  he  said.  "We're  here  to  catch 
^^^Tiitworth  and  I  am  indicating  to  your  woman's  intelli- 
gence and  your  motherly  prejudice  that  the  bait  you're 


ALMACK'S  CLUB  37 


offering  may  not  look  so  juicy  here  as  it  did  at  home 
where  it  hadn't  its  peer." 

So  he  insured  himself  against  failure,  and  the  particu- 
lar source  of  his  ill-humor  as  he  prepared  to  go  out  on 
the  day  after  their  arrival  in  town  was  not  mental  but 
physical.  To  jam  gouty  feet,  used  to  roomy  riding  boots, 
into  natty  gear  ought  to  be  nothing.  In  the  past  it  had 
been  nothing,  when  he  had  drunk  in  the  London  air  and 
found  it  the  well  of  youth,  but,  this  time,  remarkably,  the 
boots  pinched  unforgettably,  and  the  realization  that  he 
hadn't  the  resilience  of  youth,  that  he  was  in  London  yet 
hipped,  in  a  play-ground  yet  grave,  disheartened  Mr. 
Verners,  and  it  wasn't  till  that  skilled  diplomat,  the  porter 
at  Almack's,  recognized  him  instantly  with  a  salute  that 
Mr.  Verners  felt  petulance  oozed  from  him.  It  was  a 
wonderful  salute;  it  indicated  the  porter's  joy  at  seeing 
Mr.  Verners,  his  regret  that  Mr.  Verners  was  only  an  oc- 
casional visitor,  his  personal  feeling  that,  but  for  the  oc- 
casional visits  of  Mr.  Verners,  the  life  of  the  porter  of 
Almack's  Club  would  not  be  worth  living;  it  welcomed 
him  home  with  a  captivating,  deferential  flattery  and  the 
mollified  gentleman  was  to  meet  with  further  balm  inside 
the  club,  where  play  was  not  running  spectacularly  high 
and  there  were  idle  members  eager  for  the  simple  distrac- 
tion to  be  had  from  any  face  not  wearisomely  familiar. 
Besides,  Mr.  Verners  came  from  Lancashire ;  London  had 
heard  of  Lancashire  recently  and  was  willing  to  hear 
more. 

He  came  in  without  much  assurance,  but  hesitation  fled 
when  he  found  himself  the  center  of  an  interest  not  at  all 
languid. 

"Damme,  it's  Luke  Verners  come  to  town.  Business 
for  locksmiths  here,"  was  the  coarse-witted  welcome  of  a 
lord. 


38  HEPPLESTALL'S 

"Locksmiths?"  asked  Vemers. 

"Ain't  it  locksmiths  one  employs  to  put  bolts  and  bars 
on  one's  wife's  bedroom?" 

"You  flatter  me,  my  lord,"  said  Vemers. 

The  dandy  eyed  him  appraisingly.  "Perhaps  I  do, 
Vemers,  perhaps  I  do.     You  are  past  your  prime." 

"Does  your  lordship  care  to  give  me  opportunity  to 
prove  other^nse,  with  pistols,  swords  or — her  ladyship?" 

A  hot  reception?  Music  in  the  ears  of  Mr.  Verners, 
who  relished  it  for  its  coarseness,  for  what  seemed  to  him 
the  authentic  note  of  London  Town,  a  greeting  spoken 
propitiously  by  a  lord.  And  if  this  was  a  good  begin- 
ning, better  was  to  follow.  Mr.  Seccombe  rose  from  the 
chair  where  he  was  drowsing,  recognized  Vemers  with  a 
start  and  came  up  to  him  interestedly.  "Rot  your  chaff, 
Godalming,"  he  said.  *'Verners  will  give  you  as  good  as 
he  gets  any  day.  Tell  us  the  news  of  the  North,  man. 
Are  things  as  queer  as  they  say?" 

"What  do  they  say?"  asked  Luke. 

"The3'  speak  of  steam-engines." 

"Oh,  Lord,"  groaned  Godalming.  "Old  Seccombe's  on 
his  hobby-horse." 

"Of  steam-engines,"  repeated  Mr.  Seccombe  severely, 
*'and  of  workers  whose  bread  is  taken  out  of  their  mouths 
by  machinery,  so  that  they  are  thrown  upon  the  poor- 
rates  that  the  landlords  must  pay." 

"Gospel  truth,  Mr.  Seccombe,"  said  Luke  feelingly, 
*'and  yond  fellow  Arkwright,  that  began  it,  made  a  knight 
and  a  High  Sheriff  for  doing  us  the  favor  of  ruining  us. 
V^'^hat's  the  country  coming  to?" 

"Corruption  and  decay,"  said  his  lordship. 

"Is  that  so  sure?"  queried  Seccombe.  "What  is  your 
word  on  that,  Verners?" 

"Beyond  doubt,  it  is  the  end  of  all  things  when  land- 
lords are  milked  through  the  poor-rates,"  said  Luke. 


ALMACK'S  CLUB  39 

■*Yet  steam  would  appear  to  have  possibilities?" 

•'Oh,  Seccombe's  a  liopcless  crank,"  said  Godalming. 

"Possibilities  for  whom,  Mr.  Seccombe?"  asked  Vemers. 
"For  a  barber  like  this  Arkwright?  Yes,  he  throve  on 
steam,  but  what  is  that  to  us?  Will  steam  grow 
corn?" 

"Steam  is  an  infamj',"  stated  a  gentleman  called  Collin- 
son.  "You  do  not  agree,  Seccombe?  No,  why  should 
you?  You  own  houses  in  London.  Easy  for  you  to  play 
the  philosopher.  Those  of  us  with  land  are  beginning  to 
watch  the  trading  classes  closely,  and  steam  has  the  ap- 
pearance of  an  ally  to  trade  and  enemy  to  us." 

"Then  let  the  alliance  be  with  us,  Mr,  Collinson,"  said 
Seccombe.  "Lideed,  I  am  making  no  original  suggestion. 
We  have  had  the  cases  mentioned  here  of  more  than  one 
man  of  our  own  order  who — " 

"Traitors  !     Outcasts  !"  cried  Godalming. 

*'0r,  perhaps,  wise  men,  my  lord.     I  do  not  know." 

"You  don't  know  if  it  is  wise  to  sell  your  soul  to  the 
devil?" 

"Personally,"  said  Mr.  Seccombe,  "I  should  regard 
that  transaction  as  precarious,  but  not  to  the  present 
point.  There  was  mentioned  the  example  of  one  Hepple- 
stall." 

**You  have  heard  of  him — here?"  Mr.  Vemers  was  as- 
tonished. 

"We  were  interested  to  hear,"  said  Mr.  Collinson. 

*'0f  a  perversion,"  said  Godalming. 

*'Godalming  withholds  from  Mr.  Hepplestall  the  light 
of  his  approval,"  said  Mr.  Seccombe,  "but — " 

"Approve  a  turn-coat  that  was  once  a  gentleman? 
Why,  he  has  dined  at  Brooks'  and  now  blacks  his  sweaty 
hands  with  coal.  Is  there  defense  for  him?"  asked 
Godalming. 

"I  am  prepared  to  defend  him,"  said  Seccombe. 


40  HEPPLESTALL'S 

"Then  you're  a  Jacobin."  Godalming  turned  an  out- 
raged back. 

"Verners  will  correct  me  if  I  am  wrong,"  said  Collin- 
son,  "but  we  hear  of  Mr.  Hepplestall  that  he  has  a  great 
steam-driven  factory,  with  a  small  town  at  its  feet,  and 
by  his  steam  is  driving  out  of  trade  the  older  traders  in 
his  district.     Is  that  true?" 

"Entirely,"  said  Mr.  Verners,  "though  it  staggers  me 
that  news  of  so  small  a  matter  has  traveled  so  far  and 
so  fast." 

"Some  of  us  have  our  eyes  on  steam,"  said  Seccombe, 
"and  some  of  us,"  he  eyed  Godalming  with  severity,  "some 
of  us  prefer  that  a  power  like  steam  should  be  in  the  hands 
of  men  of  our  order." 

"But  they  cannot  be  of  our  order,"  protested  Verners, 
scandalized.  "They  cease,  of  their  own  conduct,  to  be  of 
our  order." 

"You  do  not  dispute  the  facts  about  Hepplestall?" 

"No.     It's  your  conclusions  I  find  amazing." 

"Oh,"  said  Godalming,  "this  isn't  Almack's  Club  at  all. 
We're  in  France,  and  Mr.  Collinson  is  wearing  a  red  cap, 
and  Mr.  Seccombe  has  no  breeches  and — rot  me  if  I  ever 
expected  to  hear  such  damned  revolutionary  sentiments 
from  an  Englishman.'* 

"Will  you  do  me  the  favor,  my  lord,  to  consider  the  pic- 
ture Mr.  Verners  has  assented  to  be  veracious?"  Mr.  Sec- 
combe said,  leaning  back  in  his  chair  and  looking  like 
nothing  so  much  as  Maclise's  Talleyrand  in  the  Fraser 
Portraits ;  elbows  on  the  arms  of  his  chair,  hands  caress- 
ing his  stomach,  knees  wide  apart,  the  sole  of  one  shoe 
rubbing  against  the  other,  a  look  of  placid  benignity  on 
his  face.  "That  large  factory,  dominating  a  town  of 
cottages  where  its  workers  live,  under  the  owner's  eye, 
and  that  owner  a  gentleman  who  has  extinguished  the 
small  lower-class  manufacturers  of  his  neighborhood.      I 


ALMACK'S  CLUB  41 

ask  you  to  consider  that  picture  and  to  tell  me  what  there 
is  in  it  that  you  feel  undesirable.     To  me,  my  lord,  it  is 
an   almost   feudal   picture.     The   Norman    Keep,   with   a 
village  clustered  around  its  walls,  is  to  my  mind  the  pre- 
cedent of  Mr.  Hepplestall's  factory  with  its  workers  in 
their  cottages  about  it.     I  confess  to  an  admiration  of 
this  Hepplestall,  whom  you  regard  as  a  traitor  to  our 
order   and  I   as   a  benefactor  to   that   order.     You  will 
hardly  assert  that  our  order  is  unshaken  by  the  deplor- 
able events  in  France,  you  will  hardly  say  that,  even  be- 
fore that  unparalleled  outbreak  of  ruffianism,  our  order 
had  maintained  the  high  prestige  of  the  Feudal  days.     A 
man  in  whose  action  I  see  possibilities  of  restoring  in  full 
our  ancient  privileges  is  a  man  to  be  approved  and  to  be 
supported  by  us.     If  we  do  not  support  him,  and  others 
like  him,  what  results?     Abandoned  by  us,  he  must  con- 
sort with  somebody  and  he  will  consort  naturally  with 
other  steam-power  manufacturers,  adding  to  their  strength 
and  weakening  ours.     It  seems  to  me  that  this  steam  is  a 
notable  instrument  for  keeping  in  their  places  those  classes 
who  might  one  day  follow  the  terrible  French  example: 
and  the  question  is  whether  it  is  better  for  us  ourselves, 
men  of  our  order,  directly  to  handle  this  instrument,  or 
whether  we  are  to  trust  it  in  the  hands  of  the  manufac- 
turing class.     For  my  own  part,  I  distrust  that  class,  I 
like  a  man  who  grasps  his  nettles  boldly  and  I  applaud 
Mr.  Hepplestall." 

Several  men  had  joined  the  circle  by  now,  and  Mr, 
Seccombe  ended  to  find  himself  the  center  of  an  atten- 
tion close  but  hostile.  Phrases  such  as  "rank  heresy'* 
and  "devil's  advocate"  made  Mr.  Collinson  feel  heroic 
when  he  said,  "Speaking  for  myself,  I  stand  converted  by 
your  argument,  Seccombe." 

At  which   Godalming  gave  the   theorist  and  his   sup- 
porter the  name  of  "a  brace  of  begad  trucklers  to  Satan,** 


42  HEPPLESTALL'S 

and  such  a  whoop  of  applause  went  up  as  caused  Mr. 
Seccombe  to  look  round  quickly  for  cover.  It  was  clear 
that  to  touch  steam  was  not  condoned  as  an  attempt  to 
revitalize  the  Feudal  system:  to  touch  steam  was  to  defile 
oneself  and  to  propose  a  defense  of  a  gentleman  who 
stooped  to  steam  was  to  be  unpopular.  Mr.  Seccombe 
liked  his  views  very  well,  but  liked  popularity  better  and, 
catching  sight  of  Whitworth  in  the  crowd,  saw  in  him  a 
means  of  distracting  attention  from  himself. 

"Have  you  a  word  on  this,  Whitworth.?"  he  asked. 
*'You  come  from  Lancashire." 

"My  word  on  this,"  he  said,  "is  Mr.  Vemers'  word. 
Like  him  I  am  the  victim  of  these  steaming  gentlemen, 
and  I  have  only  to  remember  my  bailiff's  accounts  to  know 
how  much  I  am  mulcted  in  poor-rates." 

"Imagine  Harry  Whitworth  perusing  an  account!" 
said  Godalming. 

"One  has  one's  duties,  I  believe,"  said  Sir  Harry. 
"But  I  have  been  too  long  away  from  Lancashire  to  be  a 
judge  of  this  matter.  I  can  tell  you  nothing  of  Hepple- 
stall  and  his  factory,  for  this  is  the  first  I  heard  of  it,  but 
I  can  tell  you  of  Hepplestall  and  a  parson."  And  he 
told  the  tale  of  Mr.  Bantison. 

"This  is  the  stuff  your  hero  is  made  of,  Seccombe," 
jeered  Godalming. 

*'Not  bad  stuff,"  Seccombe  heard  an  unexpected  ally 
say.  "The  stuff,  as  Seccombe  put  it,  that  grasps  a 
nettle  firmly." 

"Oh,"  conceded  Sir  Harry,  "Bantison  was  nettle 
enough.  But  as  to  steam — !"  He  shrugged  his 
shoulders,  and  gave  Mr.  Seccombe  the  opening  for  which 
he  angled. 

"It  does  not  appeal  to  you  to  go  to  Lancashire  and 
better  Hepplestall's  example?"  he  asked  blandly. 


ALMACK'S  CLUB  43 

"Good  God!"  said  Sir  Harry,  and  the  Club  was  with 
him. 

"There  might  be  wisdom  in  a  visit  to  your  estates,'* 
said  Mr.  Seccombe,  and  the  Club  was,  vociferously,  with 
him.  Mr.  Seccombe  smiled  secretly :  he  had,  gently  but 
thoroughly,  accomplished  his  purpose  of  turning  the 
volatile  thought  of  the  Club  away  from  his  argument.  He 
had  raised  a  laugh  at  Whitworth's  expense,  a  brutal 
laugh,  a  "Vae  Yictis"  laugh:  he  had  focused  attention 
on  the  case  of  Sir  Harry  Whitworth. 

It  was  not  an  unusual  case.  This  society  had  a  leader 
known,  with  grotesque  inappropriateness,  as  the  First 
Gentleman  in  Europe  and  the  First  Gentleman  in  Euroj>e 
had  invented  a  shoe-buckle.  Whitworth  tripped  over  the 
buckle;  he  criticized  it  in  ill-chosen  company  and  news  of 
his  traitorous  disparagement  was  carried  to  the  Regent. 
Whitworth  was  in  disgrace. 

The  usual  thing  and  the  discreet  thing  was  to  efface 
oneself  for  a  time,  but  Harry  Whitworth  had  the  con- 
ceit to  believe  himself  an  ornament  that  the  Prince  could 
not  dispense  with.  He  stayed  in  town,  daily  expecting  to 
be  recalled  to  court:  and  the  frank  laughter  of  Almack's 
was  a  galling  revelation  of  what  public  opinion  thought 
of  his  prospects  of  recall. 

It  was  a  humiliation  for  a  high-spirited  gentleman,  and 
an  embarrassment.  To  challenge  a  Club  was  to  invite 
more  ridicule,  while  to  single  out  Mr.  Seccombe,  the  first 
cause  of  his  discomfiture,  was  equally  impossible;  Sec- 
combe was  too  old  for  dueling;  one  did  not  go  out  with  a 
man  old  enough  to  be  one's  grandfather.  There  was 
Godalming,  but,  again,  he  feared  ridicule:  Godalming's 
special  offense  was  that  he  laughed  loudly,  but  Godalming 
habitually  laughed  loudly  and  one  couldn't  challenge  for 
insulting  emphasis  a  man  who  was  naturallj  emphatic. 


44  HEPPLESTALL'S 

"WTiitworth  saw  no  satisfactory  way  out  of  it,  till  Vemers, 
mindful  of  DorotJiy,  supplied  an  opportunity  for  retreat. 

"I  may  be  able  to  give  Sir  Harry  some  little  informa- 
tion about  his  estates.  They  are  in  good  hands,  and 
though  naturally  we  in  Lancashire  would  welcome  amongst 
us  the  presence  of  so  notable  a  landowner,  the  estate  itself 
is  well  managed  by  his  people."  Which  was  quite  a 
pretty  effort  in  tact  from  one  unaware  of  Sir  Harry's 
misfortune,  and  puzzled  by  the  laughter. 

Whitworth  snatched  at  the  opportunity,  meager  as  it 
was.  "I  will  come  with  you  to  hear  of  it,  Vemers." 
Then  as  he  turned,  a  feeling  that  he  was  making  a  poor 
show  of  it  tempted  him  to  say,  "Gentlemen,  I  heard  you 
laugh.  Next  time  we  meet,  nest  time  I  visit  Almack's, 
the  laugh  will  be  upon  the  other  side.  Godalming,  will 
you  wager  on  it.'"'  He  could  issue  that  simulacrum  of 
a  challenge,  at  any  rate.     Men  betted  upon  anything. 

"A  thousand  guineas  that  you  never  come  back,"  sug- 
gested Godalming. 

"A  thousand  that  I  am  back — back,  vou  understand  me 
— in  a  month." 

"Agreed,"  said  Godalming.  "I  back  Prinn^-'s  resolu- 
tion for  a  thousand  for  a  month." 

"Shall  we  go,  Mr.  Vemers.?"  said  Sir  Harry  to  the 
mystified  squire,  and  "Gad,  they're  betting  on  a  weather- 
vane,"  murmured  Mr.  Seccombe  in  the  ear  of  his  friend, 
Mr.  Collinson. 


CHAPTER  V 


SIR   HARRY   WOOS 


TO  know  one's  duty  and  to  do  it  are  often  dJfTerent 
things.  Sir  Harry's  duty,  as  he  knew,  was  to  re- 
gard Iiis  wild  oats  as  sown,  to  marry  Dorothy,  and  to  go 
home  quietly  to  Lancashire.  In  I^ondon,  he  competed  on 
equal  terms  with  men  far  richer  than  himself  at  a  pace 
disastrously  too  hot  for  his  means,  but  the  competition 
had  been,  socially,  a  triumph  for  him  and  to  go  back  now 
of  all  times,  when  temporarily  he  was  under  a  cloud,  was 
a  duty  against  which  his  pride  fought  liard. 

He  hadn't  compromise  in  bim  and  compromise,  in  this 
case  was  unthinkable.  It  was  either  Lancashire  with 
Dorothy,  or  London  without  her.  Dorothy  in  London 
was  not  to  be  thought  of:  no  countrybred  wife  for  him 
unless  on  the  exceptional  terms  of  her  bringing  him  a 
great  fortune,  and  what  she  was  to  bring  was  well  enough 
in  Lancashire  but  a  bagatelle  to  be  lost  or  won  at  hazard 
in  a  night  in  London.  Decidedly,  she  would  be  a  blunder 
in  TiOndon  :  if  a  man  of  his  standing  in  society  put  his 
head  under  the  yoke,  it  had  to  be  for  a  price  mucli  greater 
than  Dorothy  could  pay.  He  would  lose  caste  by  such  a 
marriage. 

There  remained  the  sensible  alternative,  the  plan  to 
be  good  and  dutiful,  to  abandon  liOndon,  ain}>ition,  youth, 
and  to  become  a  dull  and  rustic  husband.  Long  ago,  his 
father  and  Tiuke  Verners  had  come  to  an  understanding 

on  the  matter,  eminently  satisfying  to  themselves,  and  he 

45 


46  HEPPLESTALL'S 

had  let  things  remain,  vaguely,  at  that.  Certainly  he 
broke  no  promise  of  his  own  making  if  he  avoided  Dorothy 
for  ever:  and  here  he  was  going  under  escort  (and  it 
seemed  to  him  a  subtly  possessive  escort)  of  Luke  Verners 
to  call  on  Dorothy,  to,  it  was  implied,  clarify  the  situation 
and,  he  supposed,  to  declare  himself.  Well,  that  was  too 
cool  and  however  things  happened  they  were  not  going  to 
happen  quite  like  that.  He  didn't  mind  going  to  survey 
Dorothy:  indeed,  Almack's  being  closed  to  him  just  now 
by  his  own  action,  he  must  have  some  occupation ;  but  this 
Dorothy — positively  he  remembered  her  obscurely  through 
a  haze  of  other  women — this  Dorothy  must  needs  be  ex- 
traordinary if  she  were  to  reconcile  him  to  a  duty  he  re- 
sented. It  might  be  necessary  to  teach  these  good  people 
their  place.  Luke  seemed  to  Sir  Harry  uninstructed  in 
the  London  perspective  and  in  the  importance  of  being 
Whitworth. 

It  was  unfortunate  that  Mrs.  Verners  clucked  over  him 
like  a  hen  who  has  found  a  long-lost  chicken.  Her  in- 
quiries after  his  health  seemed  to  him  even  more  assured 
in  their  possessiveness  than  Luke's  attitude  of  a  keeper. 
Mrs.  Verners  was  the  assertion  of  motherhood,  and  on 
every  score  but  that  of  hard  duty,  he  was  prepared  to 
depreciate  Dorothy,  when  she  came  in,  to  the  limits  of 
justice  and  perhaps  beyond  them.  Dorothy  might  be  a 
miracle,  but  Mrs.  Verners  as  a  mother  was  a  handicap 
that  would  discount  anything. 

Then  Dorothy  came  in,  carrying  in  her  arm  a  kitten 
with  an  injured  paw.  From  her  room  she  had  heard  it 
crying  in  Albemarle  Street,  had  run  out  and  for  the  last 
ten  minutes  had  been  doctoring  it  somewhere  at  the  back 
of  the  house.  Mrs.  Verners  was  alarmed:  Dorothy  was 
still  flushed  with  running,  or,  perhaps,  with  tenderness; 
her  hair  was  riotous ;  she  was  thinking  of  the  kitten,  she 
had  the  barest  curtsy  for  Sir  Harry,  she  was  far  from 


SIR  HARRY  WOOS  47 

being  the  great  ladj  her  mother  would  have  had  her  in 
this  moment  of  meeting  with  him.  And  he  incontinently 
forgot  that  he  was  there  on  a  sort  of  compulsion,  he 
nearly  forgot  that  it  was  his  duty  to  like  her.  Emotion- 
ally, he  surrendered  at  sight  to  a  beautiful  unkempt  girl 
who  caressed  a  kitten  and,  somehow,  brought  cleanliness 
into  the  room.  "Good  God !"  said  Sir  Harry,  his  man- 
ners blown  to  pieces  along  with  his  .lecitations  by  one 
blast  of  honesty. 

If  they  could  have  been  married  there  and  then,  it  was 
not  Whitworth  who  would  have  been  backward.  All  that 
was  best  in  him  was  devotedly  and  immediately  hers,  and 
that  best  was  not  a  bad  best  either:  if  he  could  forget 
London  and  his  craving  to  be  a  figure  in  the  town,  a 
courtier  and  a  modish  rake,  he  had  the  making  of  a  faith- 
ful husband  to  such  a  woman,  satisfied  with  her,  with  coun- 
try sports  and  the  management  of  his  estate,  a  good 
father,  and  a  hearty,  genial,  eupeptic,  hard  drinking  but 
hard  exercising  representative  of  the  permanent  best  in 
English  life — the  outdoor  gentleman. 

If  he  could  forget — and  just  now  he  utterly  forgot, 
with  one  swift  backward  glance  at  London  women.  What 
were  they  to  her?  Dressmakers'  dummies,  perruquiers* 
blocks,  automata  directed  by  a  dancing-master,  cosmetical 
exteriors  to  vanity,  greed,  vice,  if  they  were  not,  like  some 
he  hated  most,  conceited  bluestockings  parading  an  erudi- 
tion that  it  didn't  become  a  woman  to  possess.  Whereas, 
Dorothy !  He  felt  from  her  a  whiflF  of  moorland  air, 
and  a  horse  between  his  legs  and  the  clean  rush  past 
him  of  invigorating  wind  and  all  the  zest  of  a  great  run 
behind  the  hounds  with  the  tang  of  burning  peat  in  his 
nostrils  and  the  scent  of  heather  coming  down  from  the 
hills.  It  wasn't  quite — it  wasn't  yet,  by  years — the  case 
of  the  roue  worn  by  experience  who  seeks  a  last  piquant 
emotion   in    religion   or    (what   seems   to   him    almost   its 


48  HEPPLESTALL'S 

equivalent)  in  a  fresh  young  girl,  but  his  situation  had 
those  elements,  with  the  added  glamor  of  discovering  that 
his  duty  was  not  merely  tolerable  but  delicious. 

"Good  God,"  he  said  again,  quite  irrepressibly  in  the 
spate  of  his  emotior,  then  realizing  that  he  was  guilty  of 
breach  of  decorum,  lapsed  to  apologetic  amenities  from 
which  they  were  to  gather  that  his  ejaculations  referred 
to  the  kitten. 

His  polite  murmur  roused  Dorothy  to  self-conscious- 
ness. "What  a  hoyden  Sir  Harry  must  be  thinking  me," 
she  said  confusedly. 

"They  are  wrong,"  said  Sir  Harry,  "who  call  red  roses 
the  flower  of  Lancashire.  That  flower  is  the  wild  heather. 
That  flower  is  you." 

*'Yes,"  said  Dorothy  with  whimsical  resignation,  "the 
commonest  flower*  that  blooms." 

*'But  a  rarity  in  London,"  he  said,  "and,  bloom  like 
yours,  rare  anywhere.  In  London,  Madam,  we  have  a 
glass-house  admiration  for  glass-house  flowers  that  wilt 
to  ruin  at  a  breath  of  open  air.  I  have  been  guilty  of 
the  bad  taste  to  share  that  admiration.  I  have  been  un- 
pardonably  forgetful  of  the  flower  of  Lancashire."  And 
he  bowed  to  Dorothy  in  as  handsome  apology  as  a  lag- 
gard lover  could  make.  "We  heard  a  word  at  the  club, 
Mr.  Vemei^,  which,  as  you  observed,  had  the  faculty  of 
annoying  me.  It  annoyed  me  because  in  a  club  one 
thinks  club-wise  and  club-wisdom  is  opaque.  I  should  not 
be  annoyed  now." 

"Are  we  to  know  what  the  word  was.f*"  asked  Mrs. 
Verners  not  too  discreetly. 

Sir  Harry  raised  his  eyebrows  slightly.  Decidedly,  he 
thought  again,  a  clucking  hen,  but  his  management  of  her 
could  wait:  this  was  his  hour  of  magnanimity.  "At  the 
club.  Madam,"  he  said,  "we  were  allowed  to  hear  a  Mr. 
Seccombe   recommending  me   to   visit  my   estates."     Sir 


SIR  HAKRY  WOOS  49 

Harry  looked  at  Dorothy.  "And  it  is  in  my  mind  that 
Seccombe  counseled  well." 

Considering  the  man  and  remembering  the  wager  with 
Godalming,  that  was  an  admission  even  more  handsome 
than  his  apology.  It  fell  short,  but  only  short,  of  actual 
declaration  and  perhaps  that  might  have  come  had  not 
Mrs.  Verners  attempted  to  force  a  pace  which  was  aston- 
ishingly fast.  She  saw  her  expedition  turning  in  its  first 
engagement  to  triumphant  victory,  but  she  wanted  the 
spoils  of  victory,  she  wanted  a  spade  to  be  called  unmis- 
takably a  spade,  she  wanted  his  declaration  in  round 
terms  before  he  left  that  room. 

"We  are  to  see  you  back  in  Lancashire.'"'  she  said  in- 
sinuatingly. 

Sir  Harry  shuddered  at  her  crude  persistence,  but,  gal- 
lantly, "I  have  good  reason  to  believe  so,"  he  replied, 
scanning  the  reason  with  an  admiration  qualified  now  by 
wonder  if  she  would  become  like  her  mother. 

*'And  you  will  come  to  stay?" 

"That  I  cannot  sa}',"  he  was  goaded  to  reply.  Damn 
the  woman!  She  was  arousing  his  worst,  she  was  re- 
awakening his  rebellion  to  the  thought  that  he  had  had 
his  fling,  she  was  tempting  him  to  continue  it  in  the  hope 
that  when  his  fling  was  ended,  Mrs.  Verners  would  have, 
mercifully,  also  ended.  He  took  his  leave  with  some 
abruptness,  treading  a  lower  air  than  that  of  his  ex- 
pectancy. 

But  Dorothy  held  her  place  with  him.  For  wife  of 
his,  this  was  the  one  woman  and  Mrs.  Verners,  in  retro- 
spect, diminished  to  the  disarmed  impotence  to  hurt  of  a 
spikeless  burr. 

He  weighed  alternatives — Dorothy,  heather,  the  moors, 
domesticity,  estates,  his  place  in  the  county  against  the 
stews  of  St.  James,  the  excitement  of  gambling  on  a  horse, 
a   prizefighter  or  the    dice,   the   hot   perfumes    of    balls, 


50  HEPPLESTALL'S 

Ranelagh,  the  clubs,  women.  He  even  threw  in  Prinny 
and  his  place  at  Court,  and  against  all  these  Dorothy, 
and  what  she  stood  for,  held  the  balance  down.  He 
formed  a  resolution  which  he  thought  immutable. 

He  assumed,  and  Mrs.  Verners  had  fed  that  assump- 
tion, that  there  were  to  be  no  difficulties  about  Dorothy 
and,  fundamentally,  she  meant  to  make  none.  She  had 
looked  away  from  Hepplestall  when  she  met  him  on  a  road, 
and  many  times  since  then  she  had  looked  back  in  mind 
to  Hepplestall,  but  Sir  Harry  was  her  fate  and  she  did 
not  quarrel  with  it.  He  had,  though,  been  bearislJy  slow 
in  accepting  her  as  his  fate  and  she  saw  no  reason  in  that 
to  smooth  his  passage  to  the  end  now  that,  clearly,  he  was 
in  the  mood  to  woo.  His  careless  absence  had  been  one 
long  punishment  for  her:  let  her  now  see  how  he  would 
take  the  short  punishment  of  being  impaled  for  a  week  or 
two  on  tenterhooks  about  her. 

He  came  again,  heralded  by  gifts,  with  hot  ardor  to 
his  wooing.  He  brought  passion  and  buttressed  that 
with  his  self-knowledgeable  desire  to  force  the  issue,  to 
make  a  contract  from  which  there  could  be  no  retreat: 
and  thereby  muddied  pure  element  with  lower  motive. 
He  complimented  her  upon  a  new  gown. 

"It  pleases  you?"  she  asked. 

"Much  less  than  the  wearer." 

"You  are  a  judge  of  ladies'  raiment,  are  you  not,  Sir 
Harry?" 

"No  more  than  becomes  a  man  of  taste." 

"One  hears,"  she  said,  "of  Lady  Betty  Standish  who 
was  at  choosing  patterns  with  her  dressmaker,  and  of  a 
gentleman  shown  into  the  room  that  chose  her  patterns 
for  her,  and  of  the  bills  that  Lady  Betty  sent  to  the  gen- 
tleman, and  of  how  he  paid  them." 

"You  have  heard  of  that?"  he  said.  "Well,  there  are 
women  in  town  capable  of  such  bad  taste  as  that." 


SIR  HARRY  WOOS  51 

"The  bad  taste  of  allowing  you  to  choose  her  gowns? 
But  were  you  not  competent  to  choose?" 

"The  bad  taste,"  he  said,  "of  sending  the  bills  to  me. 
Would  you  have  had  me  decline  to  pay  them?" 

"Again,"  she  said,  passing  no  judgment,  "there  is  a 
story  of  a  merchant  that  lived  in  Hampstead  and  drove 
one  night  with  a  plump  daughter  in  a  coach  to  eat  a 
dinner  in  the  City.  The  coach  was  stopped  on  the  Heath 
by  a  highwayman  who  wanted  nothing  of  the  merchant, 
but  was  most  gallant  to  his  daughter." 

"I  kissed  the  girl,"  said  Sir  Harry.  "It  was  done  for 
a  wager  and  I  won  it.  A  folly,  and  a  harmless  one,"  but 
he  wondered,  if  she  had  heard  of  these,  if  there  were  less 
innocent  escapades  that  she  had  heard  of.  There  was  no 
lack  of  them,  nor,  it  appeared,  of  babblers  eager  to  gos- 
sip, to  his  disservice,  about  a  man  on  whom  the  Regent 
frowned. 

"One  hears  again,"  she  said,  "that  at  Drury  Lane 
Theater," — he  blushed  in  good  earnest:  would  she  have 
the  hardihood  to  mention  a  pretty  actress  who — ?  and 
then  he  breathed  again  as  she  went  on — "there  was  once 
an  orange  wench — " 

"That  was  a  bet  I  lost,"  ho  said.  "I  was  to  dress  as 
a  woman  and  stand  with  my  basket  like  the  rest,  and  I 
was  not  to  be  identified.  I  was  identified  and  paid.  But 
what  are  these  but  the  freaks  we  all  enjoy  in  London? 
Vain  trifles,  I  admit  it,  in  the  telling.  Not  feats  to  boast 
of,  not  incidents  that  I  take  pleasure  in  hearing  you  re- 
fer to,  but,  I  protest,  innocent  enough  and  relishable  in 
the  doing." 

"Perhaps,"  she  said.  "And  while  you  relished  them  in 
London,  did  you  give  thought  to  what  I  did  at  home?" 

"You?  To  what  you  did?  What  did  you  do?"  Sir 
Harry  was  flabbergasted  at  her  question. 

*I  was  at  home,  Sir  Harry."     She  spoke  without  bit- 


«i 


52  HEPPLESTALL'S 

terness,  without  emphasis,  and  when  he  looked  sharply  at 
her,  she  seemed  to  interpret  the  look  as  an  invitation  and 
rose.  "My  mother,  I  think,  is  ready  to  accompany  us 
if  you  care  to  take  me  walking  in  the  Park." 

Decidedly  a  check  to  a  gentleman  who  proposed  to 
make  up  for  past  delays  by  a  whirlwind  wooing.  She 
was  at  home,  while  he  ruffled  it  in  London.  And  where 
else  should  she  be?  AVliat  did  she  imply?  At  any  rate, 
she  had  embarrassed  him  by  the  unexpectedness  of  her 
attack.  Of  course  she  was  at  home,  and  of  course  he 
was  a  reveler  in  London.  He  was  man,  she  woman,  and 
he  hoped  she  recognized  the  elementary  distinction. 
Whatever  her  object,  whether  she  had  the  incredible  au- 
dacity to  accuse  him — him,  open-handed  Harry — of 
something  only  to  be  defined  as  meanness,  or  whether  she 
was  only  being  witty  with  him,  she  had  certainly  discour- 
aged the  declaration  he  came  to  make. 

Mrs.  Vemers  found  him  a  moody  squire  of  dames  in 
the  Park,  while  his  sudden  puzzlement  gave  Dorothy  a 
mischievously  happy  promenade.  He  brought  them, 
after  the  shortest  of  walks,  to  their  door. 

"You  have  been  very  silent.  Sir  Harry,"  Mrs.  Verners 
told  him,  with  her  incurable  habit  of  stating  the  obvious. 
*'Are  you  not  well  to-day?" 

"Perfectly,  I  thank  you,  Madam." 

"Oh,  Lud,  mother,  it  is  but  that  you  do  not  appreciate 
Sir  Harry's  capacity  for  disguise.  In  the  past,  he  has 
been — many  things.  To-day  we  are  to  admire  him  in  the 
character  of  a  thunderstorm." 

"Indeed?"  he  said.     "Thunderstorms  break." 

"But  not  on  me,"  said  Dorothy,  and  ran  into  the 
house. 

Sir  Harry  turned  away  with  the  scantest  bow  to  Mrs. 
Verners.  This  was  a  new  flavor  and  he  wanted  to  taste 
it  well,  to  make  sure  that  he  approved  a  Dorothy  who 


SIR  HARRY  WOOS  53 

could  be  a  precipitate  hoyden  rushing  out-of-doors  to  an 
injured  kitten  and  a  woman  of  wit  that  stabbed  him 
shrewdly.  She  had  variety,  this  Dorothy ;  she  wasn't  the 
makings  of  a  dull,  complacent  wife.  Well,  and  did  he 
want  dullness  and  complacency?  He  was  going  to  Lan- 
cashire, to  a  life  that  a  Whitworth  must  live  as  an  ex- 
ample to  others:  there  was  to  be  nothing  to  demand  a 
wife's  complacency.  And  as  to  dullness,  heaven  save  him 
from  it — and  heaven  seemed,  by  making  Dorothy  Verners, 
to  have  answered  that  pra3^er.  He  decided  to  be  more  in 
love  with  Dorothy  than  before — which,  as  she  wasn't  will- 
ing to  fly  into  his  arms  when  he  crooked  a  beckoning  fin- 
ger, was  only  natural;  and  went  into  a  shop  from  which 
he  might  express  to  her  the  warmth  of  his  sentiment  at 
an  appropriate  cost.     She  should  see  if  he  was  mean ! 

In  the  shop  he  found  my  Lord  Godalming  who  was 
turning  over  some  bright  trinkets  intended  for  a  lady  who 
was  not  his  wife.  Godalming  was  surly,  eyeing  Whit- 
worth as  he  called  for  the  best  in  necklaces  that  the  shop- 
man had  to  show.  "Oli,  yes,"  said  his  lordship,  "bring 
out  the  best  for  Sir  Harry  Whitworth.  Jewels  for  Sir 
Harry  and  paste  for  me.     I  am  only  a  lord." 

"What's  put  you  out,  Godalming?" 

"Ain't  the  sight  of  your  radiant  face  enough  to  put  me 
out?     I  hate  happiness  in  others." 

"Then  I  can  offer  you  the  consolation  of  knowing  that 
my  happiness  will  not  be  visible  to  you  long.  I  propose 
very  shortly  to  go  North,  my  lord,  and  to  stay  there.'* 

Godalming  flopped  back  against  the  counter  like  a 
fainting  man  who  must  support  himself  and,  indeed,  his 
astonishment  was  genuine  enough.  "Go  North?"  he 
gasped.     "Are  you  gone  stark  mad?" 

"I  have  flattered  myself  to  the  contrary,"  said  Sir 
Harry,  with  complacency.  "I  have  believed  that  I  have 
recovered  mv  senses." 


54  HEPPLESTALL'S 


«i 


'Rot  me  if  I  understand  you,"  said  his  lordship. 

"Yet  you  find  me  in  the  article  of  choosing  a  necklace." 

"Damme,  Whitworth,  are  there  no  women  nearer  than 
the  North  Pole?  Is  there  no  difference  between  gallantry 
ftnd  lunacy?" 

"I  am  thinking  of  marriage,  my  lord." 

"Oh,  Lud,  yes,  we've  all  to  come  to  that.  But  we  don't 
come  to  it  happily.  We  don't  think  of  it  with  our  faces 
like  the  August  sun.  I'm  the  last  man  to  believe  your 
smirking  face  covers  thoughts  of  marriage.  I  know  too 
xreU  what  it  does  cover." 

"Indeed?     And  what?" 

"^Vhat?  Burn  me  if  you  are  not  the  most  exasperating 
man  alive.     Have  you  no  recollections  of  a  wager?" 

*'I  am  bound  to  make  you  an  admission,  Godalming. 
Occupied  with  other  matters,  I  had  for  the  moment  for- 
got our  wager.  But  you  need  have  no  fears.  I  pay  my 
debts." 

"Pay?  Where  in  the  devil's  name  have  you  been  hid- 
ing yourself  if  you  don't  know  you've  won  the  wager?" 

"Won  it?"  cried  Sir  Harry. 

*'What  else  are  you  happy  for?" 

*'I  give  you  mj  word  I  did  not  know  of  this,  Godal- 
ming." 

*'The  news  has  been  about  the  town  these  last  two  hours. 
A  courier  has  ridden  in  from  Brighton  summoning  you  to 
Prinny's  table  to-morrow.  He  is  tired  of  his  shoe  buckle 
and  vows  that  you  are  right  about  it.  They  say  he  wrote 
you  the  recall  with  his  own  gouty  hand.  There's  con- 
descension, damn  you,  and  you  let  me  be  the  one  to  tell 
you  news  of  it,  me  that  loses  a  thousand  by  it !" 

*'I  have  been  some  hours  absent  from  my  rooms,"  apolo- 
gized Sir  Harry.  "But  this !  This !"  And  if  his  face 
glowed  before,  it  blazed  now  in  the  intoxication  of  a  great 
Tictorj.     He  wasn't  thinking  of  the  wager  he  had  won. 


SIR  HARRY  WOOS  55 

and  still  less  of  the  lady  who  was  his  to  win:  he  was 
thinking  of  a  fat,  graceful,  capricious  Prince  who  used 
his  male  friends  as  he  used  his  female,  like  dirt,  who  drove 
a  coach  with  distinction  and  hadn't  another  achievement, 
who  had  taken  Harry  Whitworth  back  into  a  favor  that 
was  a  degradation ;  and  Harry  Whitworth  thought  of  his 
restoration  to  that  slippery  foothold  as  a  triumph  and  a 
glimpse  of  paradise!  The  Regent  had  forgiven  him  and 
nothing  else  mattered. 

He  savored  it  a  while,  then  became  conscious  of  a  shop- 
man with  a  tray  of  jewels,  and  of  why  he  came  into  the 
shop.  He  had  the  grace  to  lower  his  voice  from  Godal- 
ming's  hearing  as  he  said,  "You  must  have  finer  ones 
than  these.  I  desire  the  necklace  to  be  of  the  value  of 
one  thousand  guineas." 

He  chose,  while  Godalming  bought  his  pretentious  trifle, 
and  gave  Dorothy's  address.  Then,  "I  believe  that  I  am 
now  entitled  to  the  freedom  of  Almack's  Club,  my  lord,'* 
he  said.  "Do  you  go  in  that  direction?"  And  Godal- 
ming, who  was  not  a  good  loser,  was  too  sensitive  to  the 
social  ascendency  of  the  man  whom  the  Regent  forgave 
to  decline  his  proffered  company.  The  wind  blowing 
South  for  Whitworth,  it  wasn't  desirable  that  word  of 
Godalming's  wagering  on  its  remaining  North  should  be 
carried  to  royal  ears:  he  had  better,  on  all  counts,  make 
light  of  his  loss  and  be  seen  companionably  with  this 
child  of  fortune. 

Not  to  mention  the  simpler  fact  that  Godalming  was  a 
thirsty  soul  and  that  such  a  reversal  of  fortune  as  had 
come  to  Harry  was  only  to  be  celebrated  with  high  junket- 
ing. Indirectly,  in  his  person  of  loser  of  the  wager, 
Godalming  was  the  host  and  it  wasn't  proper  for  a  host 
to  be  absent  from  his  own  table. 

Intrinsically,  a  wager  of  a  thousand  guineas  was  noth- 
ing to  lift  eyebrows  at :  Mr.  Fox  once  played  for  twenty- 


56  HEPPLESTALL'S 

two  hours  at  a  sitting  and  lost  £500  an  hour,  and  the 
celebration  of  a  victory  was  what  the  victor  cared  to 
make  it.  Sir  Harry  had  more  than  the  winning  of  a  bet 
to  celebrate,  he  had  a  rehabilitation  and  proposed  to  him- 
self the  considerable  feat  of  making  Almack's  drunk.  It 
was  afternoon,  but  any  time  was  drinking  time,  and  only 
the  darkness  of  mid-winter  lasted  long  enough  to  cloak 
their  heroic  debauchery.  Men  were  not  rare  who  kept 
their  wits  and  were  steady  on  their  legs  after  the  sixth 
bottle,  and  why  indeed  cloak  drunkenness  at  all,  if  at  the 
seventh  bottle  a  gentleman  succumbed?  There  was  no 
shame  in  falling  in  a  good  fight:  the  shame  was  to  the 
shirker  and  the  unfortunate  born  with  a  weak  head,  a 
puny  three-bottle  man. 

This  is  to  generalize,  which,  perhaps,  is  better  than  a 
particular  description  in  this  squeamish  day  of  the  oc- 
casion when  Harry  Whitworth  made  his  re-appearance  at 
Almack's  resolved  to  write  his  name  large  in  the  Bac- 
chanalian annals  of  the  Club.  He  was  to  dine  in  the 
Pavilion  at  Brighton  with  his  Royal  Highness  next  night, 
and,  by  the  Lord,  Almack's  was  to  remember  that  he  had 
come  into  his  own  again. 

Some  crowded  hours  had  passed  when  the  memorialist 
at  the  table's  head  unsteadily  picked  up  a  glass  and  say- 
ing mechanically,  "A  glass  of  wine  with  you,  sir,"  found 
himself  isolating  from  a  ruddy  haze  the  flushed  face  of 
Mr.  Verners. 

"Verners!"  he  cried.  "Verners!  What's  the  connec- 
tion? Dorothy,  by  Gad!  Going  Brighton  kiss  Prinny's 
hand  to-morrow,  Verners.  Going  your  house  kiss  Doro- 
thy's hand  to-night.  Better  the  night,  better  the  deed. 
Dor'thy  first,  Prinny  second.  Gentlemen,  Dorothy  Ver- 
ners !" 

There  wasn't  more  sobriety  in  the  whole  company  than 
would  have   sufficed  to   add  two   and  two  together,   and 


SIR  HARRY  WOOS  5T 

nobody  noticed,  let  alone  protested,  when  the  host  reeled 
from  the  table,  linked  his  arm  in  that  of  Mr.  Vemers  and 
left  the  room.  Mr.  Verners'  mind  was  a  blessed  blank 
gently  suffused  with  joy.  Incapable  of  thought,  he  felt 
that  he  had  on  his  arm  a  prisoner  whose  capture  was  to 
do  him  great  honor.  The  servants  put  them  tenderly  in 
a  coach  for  the  short  drive  to  Albemarle  Street. 

"I  shall  call  you  Father,"  said  Sir  Harry,  and  the 
singular  spectacle  might  have  been  observed,  had  the  night 
been  light  and  the  coach  open,  of  an  elderly  gentleman  en- 
deavoring to  kiss  the  cheek  of  a  younger,  his  efforts  frus- 
trated by  the  jolting  of  the  coach,  so  that  the  pair  of 
them  pivoted  to  and  fro  on  their  bases  like  those  absurd 
weighted  toy  eggs  the  pedlars  sell,  and  came,  swaying 
in  ludicrous  rhythm,  to  the  Verners'  lodging. 

During  the  afternoon  the  necklace  had  been  delivered, 
and  if  Dorothy  was  no  connoisseur  of  jewels  she  was  suffi- 
ciently informed  to  know  that  here  was  a  peace-offering 
of  royal  value.  She  had  twitted  Sir  Harry  Avith  his  fol- 
lies, she  had  watched  him  draw  the  right  conclusion  from 
her  recital  of  some  of  them — the  conclusion  that  she  re- 
sented his  preference  for  such  a  life  to  coming,  long  ago, 
to  where  she  and  duty  and  she  and  love  were  waiting  for 
him — she  had  mocked  him  at  her  door,  and  had  mocked 
his  sullen  face  when  she  compared  him  with  a  thunder- 
storm :  and  she  wondered  if  she  had  not  gone  too  far,  been 
too  severe.  Mrs.  Verners  lectured  her  unsparingly  on 
her  waywardness,  and  Dorothy  inclined  to  think  that  she 
deserved  the  lecture.  Then  the  necklace  came  and  if  a 
gift  like  that  was  not  as  plain  a  declaration  as  anything 
unspoken  could  be,  Dorothy  was  no  judge,  or  her  mother 
either.  The  lecture  ended  suddenly,  turned  to  a  gush  of 
admiration  of  such  magnificence.  Harry  had  won  for- 
giveness, Dorothy  decided,  and  if  he  came  next  day  in 
wooing  vein  it  wasn't  she  who  would  check  his  ardor  a 


58  HEPPLESTALL'S 

second  time.  One  need  not  be  called  a  materialist  be- 
cause a  symbol  that  is  costly  convinced  at  once,  when  a 
cheap  symbol  would  be  ineffective. 

She  was  ready  for  Sir  Harry,  but  not  for  this  Sir 
Harry.  The  giver  of  princely  gifts  should  live  up  to  his 
princedom,  not  in  the  sense  of  His  Royal  Highness, 
George,  but  in  the  romantic  sense.  She  had  been  idealiz- 
ing Harry  since  the  precious  token  came  and  he  came — 
like  this,  lurching,  thick-voiced,  beastly.  True,  a  gen- 
tleman lost  nothing  of  gentlemanliness  by  appearing 
flushed  with  wine  before  ladies  ;  but  there  were  degrees  and 
his  was  a  condition  beyond  the  most  indulgent  pale.  Old 
husbands — Mr.  Vemers  is  the  example — might  have  no 
surprises  for  their  wives,  but  to  come  a-wooing  in  his 
cups  was  outrage. 

Mrs.  Vemers  made  an  effort.  *'Dorothy,"  she  whis- 
pered, "remember  the  necklace.  Don't  be  too  nice.'* 
Dorothy  remembered  nothing  but  that  this  beast  that  had 
been  a  man  was  reeling  towards  her,  making  endearing 
noises,  with  the  plain  intention  of  kissing  her.  Her  whole 
being  seemed  to  concentrate  itself  to  defeat  his  intention: 
she  hit  him,  and  hit  hard,  upon  the  face  and  Sir  Harry 
sat  stupidly  on  the  floor.  Then,  defying  her  mother  with 
her  eye,  she  remembered  the  necklace. 

His  man,  undressing  him  that  night,  found  an  excep- 
tional necklace  round  his  neck  beneath  his  rufi!es.  He 
thought  of  Sir  Harry  and  his  condition,  of  the  obliterat- 
ing effect  of  much  alcohol,  of  theft  and  of  the  hanging 
that  befell  a  convicted  thief  and,  after  balancing  these 
thoughts,  he  stole  the  necklace.  There  were  no  inquiries 
made. 


CRAPTKR  VI 


THE   MAX  WHO  WOK 


IT  i«  said  that  the  Cliinese  use  a  form  of  torture  con- 
sisting in  thf;  unintffrruptfrd  dripping,  drop  by  drop, 
of  watf;r  on  th*^;  hf-arj  of  a  victim  who  tventuaUj  gofrs  rnad. 
Mrs.  Verrifcrfi,  though  not  Chines<r,  used  a  similar  form  of 
torture  as  they  drove  North  from  London  in  the  coach, 
but  Dorothy  dirj  not  go  mad  under  the  interminable  flow 
of  bitt/.r  comment.  Instea/l,  she  watched  the  milestones 
and,  as  each  was  passed,  made  and  kept  the  resolution 
not  to  scream,  or  to  jump  out  or  to  strike  her  mother  until 
they  reached  the  next,  and  so,  by  a  series  of  mile-long 
constraints,  disciplined  herself  to  hKrar  the  whole. 

After  Mrs.  Verrjers  harj  said  that  Dorothy  was  a  grace- 
less girl  who  had  made  them  all  into  laughing-stocks  and 
an  affected  prude  whose  nicety  was  monstrous,  and  a  con- 
ceited, pedantic,  prim  ignoramus  who  had  the  bumkinly 
expectation  that  men  were  saints,  and  a  pampered  milksop 
who  ha/1  made  her  unfortunate  parents  the  jest  of  the 
town,  there  really  was  not  much  more  to  say,  but  the  lady 
had  suffered  disappointment  and  did  not  suffer  it  silently. 

Occasionally,  for  a  change,  she  turned  her  batteries  on 

Mr.  Verners  who,  poor  man,  was  paying  by  an  attack  of 

gout  for  his  London   indulgences  and  couldn't  sleep  the 

miles  away.     There  was   some  justice  in  her  attacks  on 

Mr.  Verners.      He  was  first  cause  of  Dorothy's  conduct 

to  Sir  Harry:  he  had  brought  Sir  Harry  home  to  them 

that  night:  he  was  accessory  to  their  disaster. 

69 


60  HEPPLESTALL'S 

"Well,  well,  but  it  is  over,"  he  said  a  dozen  times. 

*'But — ,"  and  she  began  again  with  stupid  and  stupe- 
fying iteration. 

Mr.  Verners,  after  a  trip  to  town,  was  matter  apt  for 
stupefaction.  It  would  need  days  of  hard  riding  on  peni- 
tential diet  at  home  to  sweat  the  aches  out  of  him,  but 
even  while  Mrs.  Verners  was  elaborating  the  theme  that 
all  was  lost,  he  was  conscious  of  a  reason,  somewhere  at 
the  back  of  his  mind,  for  believing  that  all  was  not  lost. 
He  couldn't  dredge  the  reason  to  the  surface,  and  he 
couldn't  imagine  what  grounds  for  cheerfulness  there 
were,  but  he  felt  sure  that  something  had  happened  in 
London,  or  that  something  had  been  said  in  London  which 
offered  new  hope  to  a  depressed  family.  For  three  days 
he  fished  vainly  in  the  muddied  waters  of  his  recollection 
for  that  bright  treasure-trove,  then,  when  they  were  reach- 
ing their  journey's  end  and  were  within  a  few  miles  of 
home,  he  saw  Hepplestall's  factory  crowning  the  hill-top, 
with  its  stack  belching  black  smoke,  and  remembered  how 
unexpectedly  significant  this  Hepplestall  had  loomed  in  a 
conversation  at  Almack's  Club. 

He  didn't  at  first  associate  that  strange  significance  of 
Hepplestall  with  his  sense  that  he  had  brought  hope  with 
him  from  London.  True,  there  was  this  difference  be- 
tween his  wife's  motives  and  his — that  she  had  wanted  to 
see  Dorothy  married  to  Wliitworth,  and  he  wanted  to 
see  Dorothy  married.  Dorothy  in  any  man's  home,  within 
reason ;  but  his  was  the  ideal  of  the  father  who  felt  in  her 
presence  a  cramping  necessity  to  restraint,  and,  if  any 
man's,  why  should  he  think  of  Hepplestall's  in  particular, 
when,  since  Sir  Harry  was  out  of  the  running,  there  was 
a  host  of  sufficiently  eligible  young  men  and  when  now  he 
watched  his  wife's  resentful  glare  as  she  looked  at  that 
unsightly  chimney? 

It  was  on  the  tip  of  his  tongue  to  tell  her  at  once  that 


THE  MAN  WHO  WON  61 

Whitworth  was  not  their  only  neighbor  to  be  spoken  of 
respectfully,  but  on  second  thoughts  that  had  better  wait 
till  Dorothy  was  not  present  to  hear  her  mother's  in- 
evitable first  pungencies.  He  wanted  Dorothy  married, 
and  it  was  easy  to  marry  her  to  almost  any  bachelor  in 
the  county;  yet  here  was  Luke  Verners  settling  it  ob- 
stinately in  his.  mind  that  Hepplestall  was  the  husband  he 
wished  for  her.  Hepplestall  had  been  heard  of  in  Lon- 
don, which  was  one  wonder,  and  had  been  the  subject  of 
a  serious  discussion  at  a  gaming  club,  which  was  a  greater 
wonder,  and  Verners,  who  had  helped  to  dig  the  gulf  be- 
tween Reuben  and  the  county,  was  now  considering  how 
the  gulf  was  to  be  bridged.  Was  steam  atrocious,  when 
it  gained  a  man  the  commendation  of  Mr.  Seccombe?  He 
recalled  Seccombe's  comparison  of  the  factory  and  its 
surrounding  cottages  with  the  feudal  chieftain's  keep,  and 
as  he  looked  again  at  Hcpplestall's  creation,  he  saw  how 
apt  the  comparison  was,  he  saw  alliance  with  Reuben  as 
an  astute  move  that  might  give  him  footing  on  the  win- 
ning side,  as,  emphatically,  a  "deep"  thing.  If  steam 
were  a  success,  it  couldn't  be  an  atrocity. 

Whether  it  were  atrocity  or  not,  there  was  no  question 
but  that  steam,  in  Reuben's  hands,  was  a  success.  He  was 
working  with  a  tigerish  energy  that  left  no  stone  un- 
turned in  the  consolidation  of  his  position.  As  yet  he 
was  a  monopolist  of  steam  in  the  district,  but  that  was 
an  advantage  that  couldn't  last  and  he  meant  when  he 
had  to  meet  more  up-to-date  competition  than  that  of 
the  water-power  manufacturers  to  be  impregnably  estab- 
lished to  meet  it.  He  hadn't  time  to  think  of  other  things 
— such  as  women,  or  the  county,  or  Dorothy  Verners  or 
even  Phoebe  Bradshaw. 

Phoebe  had  borne  him  a  son.  Reuben  had  not  de- 
cided— he  had  not  had  time  to  decide — but  he  didn't  think 
that  mattered.     If  he  was  going  to  marry  her — to  silence 


62  HEPPLESTALL'S 

her  he  had  promised  marriage  and,  so  far  as  he  knew,  in- 
tended to  keep  his  promise — it  was  because  he  had  a  fond- 
ness for  her  but,  beyond  that,  because  he  hoped  to  see 
the  county  cringe  to  his  wife,  and  if  it  was  going  to  please 
him  to  watch  them  cringe  to  a  Mrs.  Reuben  HepplestaU 
who  was  Peter  Bradshaw's  daughter,  it  was  going  to 
please  him  more  to  watch  them  cringe  to  a  woman  who 
was  the  mother  of  his  son  before  he  married  her.  That 
was  his  present  view,  and  because  of  it  he  permitted  Peter 
to  jog  on  at  his  little  factory,  he  didn't  starve  Peter  out 
of  existence  as  he  was  starving  the  other  water-power 
manufacturers  of  the  neighborhood,  he  wasn't  forcing 
Peter's  workpeople  into  the  steam  factory  by  the  simple 
process  of  leaving  them  no  other  place  in  which  to  find 
employment.  Peter  was  privileged,  a  King  Canute  mi- 
raculously untouched  by  the  tide  of  progress ;  but,  for 
the  rest  of  them,  for  Peter's  like  who  were  unprivileged, 
Reuben  was  rutliless.  He  wanted  their  skilled  laborers  in 
liis  factory,  and  he  undercut  their  prices,  naturally, 
thanks  to  steam,  and  unnaturally,  thanks  to  policy,  till 
he  drove  them  to  ruin,  filled  his  factory  Avith  their  work- 
people, sometimes  flinging  an  overseer's  job  to  the  man- 
ufacturer he  had  ruined,  sometimes  ignoring  him.  He 
was  building  a  second  factory  now,  out  of  the  profits  of 
the  first.  He  had  to  rise,  to  rise,  to  go  on  rising  till  he 
dominated  the  county,  till  the  gentry  came  to  pay  court 
to  the  man  they  had  flouted.  That  was  the  day  he  lived 
for,  the  day  when  they  would  fawn  and  he  would  show 
them — perhaps  with  Phoebe  by  his  side — what  it  meant 
to  be  a  HepplestaU  in  Lancashire.  In  his  mine  there 
were  hewers  of  coal,  in  the  factory  men,  women  and  chil- 
dren, laboring  extravagant  hours  for  derisory  pay  to  the 
end  that  HepplestaU  might  set  his  foot  upon  the  county's 
neck. 

All  this  was  background;  motive,  certainly,  but  motive 


THE  MAN  WHO  WON  68 

so  covert  beneath  the  daily  need  to  plan  fresh  enterprise, 
to  produce  cotton  yam  by  the  thousand  pounds  and  cloth 
by  the  mile  as  never  to  obtrude  into  his  conscious  thought 
at  all.  This  was  his  interim  of  building  and  till  he  had 
built  securely  he  could  not  pause  to  think  of  other  issues. 
The  county,  for  example:  he  wasn't  speculating  as  to 
where  he  stood  with  the  county  now:  the  time  for  the 
county's  attention  would  come  when  he  stood,  a  grown 
colossus,  over  it  and  he  was  only  growing  yet.  He  didn't 
anticipate  that  the  county  would  make  advances  at  this 
stage,  that  to  some  of  them  this  stage  might  seem  already 
advanced  while  to  him,  with  his  head  full  of  plans  for 
development,  the  stage  was  elementary.  He  didn't  antici- 
pate Luke  Vemers. 

Mr.  Vemers,  diplomat,  came  into  the  factory-yard  lead- 
ing a  horse  which  had  shed  a  shoe,  and  called  to  a  pass- 
ing boy  to  know  if  Mr.  Hepplestall  were  in.  Reuben  was 
in,  in  the  office,  in  his  shirt-sleeves,  and  though  Vemers 
did  not  know  this,  it  was  a  score  for  the  bridge-builder 
that  Reuben,  on  hearing  of  his  presence,  placed  his  pen  on 
his  desk  instead  of  behind  his  ear  and  put  on  his  coat  be- 
fore going  out. 

"I  deem  this  good  fortune  and  not  bad  since  it  hap- 
pened at  your  gates,  Hepplestall,"  said  Luke.  "If  you 
have  a  forge  here,  can  I  trouble  you?  If  not  there's  a 
smithy  not  a  mile  away."  He  gave  Reuben  a  choice :  his 
advance  was  to  be  accepted  or  rejected  as  Reuben  decided. 

"I  have  the  means  to  shoe  my  wagon  horses,"  said 
Reuben,  indicating  at  once  that  his  was  a  self-supporting 
and  a  trading  organization.  If  Vemers  cared  to  have 
his  horse  shod  on  Reuben's  premises,  the  shoeing  would 
be  good,  but  it  would  bring  Luke  into  contact  with  trade. 

Luke  nodded  as  one  who  understood  the  implications. 
"I  shall  take  it  as  a  favor,  Hepplestall,"  he  said,  and  Reu- 
ben gave  his  orders,  then,  "I  can  offer  you  a  glass  of 


64  HEPPLESTALL'S 

wine,"  he  said,  "but  it  will  be  in  the  oflfice  of  a  manu- 
facturer." And  the  astonishing  Mr.  Verners  bowed  and 
said,  "Why  not.?  Although  an  idle  man  must  not  waste 
your  time." 

"I  turned  manufacturer,"  said  Reuben,  "not  slave," 
and  led  the  way  into  the  office.  Followed  amenities,  and 
the  implicit  understanding  that  there  had  never  been  a 
breach,  that  for  Hepplestall  to  set  up  a  factory  was  the 
most  natural  thing  in  the  world  and  when,  presently,  his 
horse  was  announced  to  be  ready,  "When,"  asked  Luke, 
"are  we  to  see  you  at  dinner,  Hepplestall?" 

Reuben  felt  that  the  olive  branch  oozed  oil.  "I  have 
not  dined  much  from  home  of  late,"  he  said,  doubtfully. 

"Then  let  me  make  a  feast  to  celebrate  your  return." 

"To  what  fold,  Mr.  Verners?" 

*'Well,"  said  Luke,  "if  you  are  doubtful,  let  me  tempt 
you.  Let  me  tell  you  of  my  wife  and  of  my  daughter  but 
new  returned  from  London  with  the  latest  modes." 

*'Thankee,  Mr.  Verners,"  said  Reuben,  "it  is  not  in 
m.y  recollection  that  I  ever  met  you  face  to  face  and  that 
you  did  not  know  me.  But  it  is  firml}^  in  my  mind  that 
Mistress  Dorothy  Verners  gave  me  the  cut  direct." 

"I  did  not  know  of  this,"  said  Luke,  truthfully. 

*'No?  Yet  she  acted  as  others  have  acted.  You  will 
do  me  the  justice  to  note  that  if  I  find  your  invitation 
remarkable,  I  have  reason." 

"Then  I  repeat  it,  Hepplestall.  I  press  it.  Dorothj' 
shall  repent  her  discourtesy.  I — "  (he  drew  himself  up 
to  voice  a  boast  he  devoutly  hoped  he  could  make  good) 
*'I  am  master  in  my  house." 

"No,"  said  Reuben,  "No,  Mr.  Verners,  I  will  not  come 
to  dinner  when  my  appearance  has  been  canvassed  and 
prepared  for.  But  I  will  ride  home  with  you  now,  if  you 
are  willing,  and  you  shall  tell  me  as  we  go  what,  besides 
purchasing  the  latest  modes,  you  did  in  London." 


THE  MAN  WHO  WON  65 

Luke  was  regretting  many  things,  the  impulse  which 
brought  him  riding  in  that  direction  and  made  him  loosen 
a  horse-shoe  up  a  lane  near  the  factory,  and  the  cowardice 
that  had  prevented  his  mentioning  his  intention  to  Mrs. 
Verners  who  had  not  yet  been  given  an  opportunity  to 
look  at  Reuben  Hepplestall  through  the  sage  eyes  of  Mr. 
Seccombe  of  Almack's  Club.  To  take  Reuben  home  now 
was  to  introduce  a  bolt  from  the  blue  and  Mr.  Verners 
shuddered  at  the  consequences.  He  couldn't  trust  his 
wife,  taken  by  surprise,  to  be  socially  suave,  and  Dorothy, 
whom  he  thought  he  could  trust,  had  been  rude  to  Reu- 
ben— naturally,  inevitably,  in  those  circumstances  quite 
properly,  but,  in  these,  how  disastrously  inaptly !  By 
Luke's  reading  of  the  rules  of  the  game,  Reuben  should 
have  been  grateful  for  recognition  on  any  terms,  and,  in- 
stead, the  confounded  fellow  was  aggressive,  dictating 
terms,  impaling  Mr.  Verners  on  the  horns  of  dilemma. 
He  had  said,  "If  you  are  willing,"  but  that,  it  seemed, 
was  formal  courtesy,  for  Reuben  was  calmly  ordering  his 
horse  to  be  saddled. 

Had  he  no  mercy?  Couldn't  he  see  how  the  sweat  was 
standing  out  on  Mr.  Verners'  face?  Was  this  another 
example  like  the  case  of  Mr.  Bantison  of  doing  what 
Seccombe  admired,  of  grasping  a  nettle  boldly?  Mr. 
Verners  objected  to  be  the  nettle,  but  didn't  see  how  he 
was  to  escape  the  grasp.  The  grasp  of  Reuben  Hepple- 
stall seemed  inescapable. 

He  committed  himself  to  fate,  with  an  awful  sinking 
feeling  that  he  whose  fate  it  is  to  trust  to  women's  tact 
is  lost. 

"And  in  London,"  asked  Reuben  as  they  rode  out  of 
the  yard.     "You  did?" 

Luke  chatted  with  a  pitiful  vivacity  of  all  the  non- 
committal things  he  could,  while  Reuben  listened  grimly 
and   said  nothing.     Did   ever   a   sanguine   gentleman   set 


66  HEPPLESTALL'S 

out  to  condescend  and  come  home  so  like  a  captire  and  a 
criminal?  He  had  the  impression  of  being  not  onlj  crim- 
inal but  condemned  when  Reuben  said,  dismounting  at 
Verners'  door,  "So  far  I  have  not  found  the  answer  to 
this  riddle,  sir.  Perhaps  it  is  to  be  found  in  your  draw- 
ing-room ?" 

Mrs.  Verners  and  Dorothy  were  to  be  found  in  the 
drawing-room,  and  if  Luke  had  been  concerned  about  his 
wife's  attitude  he  might  have  spared  himself  that  trouble. 
She  gave  a  little  cry  and  looked  helplessly  at  Reuben  as 
if  he  were  a  ghost,  and  he  gave  a  little  bow  and  that  was 
the  end  of  her.  She  could  have  fainted  or  gone  into  hys- 
terics or  made  a  speech  as  long  as  one  of  Mr.  Burke's  and 
Reuben  would  have  cared  for  the  one  as  little  as  the  other. 
He  was  looking  at  Dorothy. 

"I  have  brought  Mr.  Hepplestall  home  with  me,"  waa 
Luke's  introduction. 

"And,"  said  Reuben  to  Dorothy,  "is  Mr.  HeppIestaJl 
risible  ?" 

^'Perfectly,"  she  said  and  bowed. 

"I  rejoice  to  hear,"  he  said  gravely,  *'of  the  restora- 
tion of  your  eyesight.  You  see  me  better  than  on  a  day 
a  year  ago?" 

"I  see  you  better,"  said  Dorothy,  meeting  his  eye,  "be- 
cause I  see  you  singly,"  and  he  had  to  acknowledge  that 
a  spirited  reply  to  his  attack.  It  put  him  beautifully  in 
the  wrong,  it  suggested  that  he  had  permitted  himself  to 
be  seen  by  a  lady  when  in  the  company  of  one  who  was 
not  a  lady,  it  implied  that  the  cut  was  not  for  him  but 
his  companion,  that  there  was  no  fault  in  Dorothy  but 
in  him  who  carried  a  blazing  indiscretion  like  Phoebe 
Bradshaw  into  the  public  road,  and  that  he  was  tactless 
now  to  remind  Dorothy  of  her  correct  repudiation  of  liim 
when  he  paraded  an  impropriety. 

She  flung  Phoebe  to  the  gutter,  she  made  a  debating 


THE  MAN  WHO  WON  67 

point  and  showed  him  how  easy  it  was  to  pretend  that  he 
had  never  been  refused  recognition.  All  that  was  neces- 
sary for  his  acceptance  of  her  point  was  his  agreement 
that  Phoebe  was,  in  fact,  of  no  importance. 

And  Reuben  concurred.  "I  have  to  apologize  for  an 
indiscretion,"  he  said,  deposing  Phoebe  from  her  precari- 
ous throne,  and  giving  her  the  disreputable  status  latent 
in  Dorothy's  retort. 

So  much  for  Phoebe,  whereas  he,  wonderfully,  was  be- 
ing smiled  upon  by  Dorothy  Vomers.  The  gracious  bow 
with  which  she  accepted  his  apology  was  an  accolade,  it 
was  a  sign  that  if  he  was  a  manufacturer  he  was  never- 
theless a  gentleman,  that  for  him  manufacturing  was, 
uniquely,  condoned.  But  he  thought  it  needful  to  make 
sure  of  that. 

"There  is  a  greater  indiscretion,"  he  said,  "for  which 
I  do  not  apologize.  I  am  a  trader  and  trader  I  remain, 
unrepentant,  Miss  Vemers,  unashamed." 

"I  have  heard  of  worse  foibles,"  said  Dorothy,  thinking 
of  Sir  Harry. 

But  he  couldn't  leave  it  at  that:  he  couldn't  be  light 
and  accept  lightness  about  steam.  "A  foible  is  a  care- 
less thing,"  he  said.  "I  am  passionate  about  my  steam- 
engines." 

"Indeed,  you  have  a  notable  great  place  up  there,"  said 
Luke. 

"It  will  be  greater,"  said  Reuben.  "I  am  to  grow  and 
it  with  me."  Then  some  sense  either  that  he  was  knock- 
ing at  an  open  door  or  merely  of  the  convenances  made 
him  add,  "My  hobby-horse  is  bolting  with  me,  but  I  felt 
a  need  to  be  definite." 

He  was  not,  he  meant,  to  be  bribed  out  of  his  manu- 
facturing by  being  countenanced.  He  wanted  Dorothy, 
but  he  wanted,  too,  his  leadership  in  cotton.  And  Doro- 
thy was  contrasting  this  man's  passion  with  Sir  Harry's, 


68  HEPPLESTALL'S 

which  she  took  justifiably,  but  not  quite  justly,  to  be 
liquor,  while  steam  seemed  romantically  daring  and  mys- 
terious. She  knew  what  drink  did  to  a  man  and  she  did 
not  know  what  steam  was  to  do.  Reuben  seemed  to  her 
a  virile  person ;  she  was  falling  in  love  with  him. 

Mrs.  Verners,  inwardly  one  mark  of  interrogation,  was 
taking  her  cue  from  the  others  who  so  amazingly  wel- 
comed a  prodigal,  swallowing  a  pill  and  hiding  her  judg- 
ment of  its  flavor  behind  a  civil  smile.  "Does  Mr.  Hep- 
plestall  know  that  we  have  been  to  London?"  she 
asked. 

Luke  felt  precipices  gape  for  him;  this  was  the  road 
to  revelations  of  his  motives,  but  Reuben  turned  it  to  a 
harmless  by-path.  "So  I  have  heard,"  he  said.  "I  was 
promised  news  of  the  fashions."  And  fashions,  and  the 
opinions  of  Mrs.  Verners  on  fashions,  gently  nursed  to 
its  placid  end  a  call  of  which  Luke  had  expected  nothing 
short  of  catastrophe.  Reuben  was  sedulously  attentive 
to  Mrs.  Verners,  wonderfully  in  agreement  with  her  views, 
and  Luke,  returning  from  seeing  him  to  his  horse,  had 
the  unhoped  for  satisfaction  of  hearing  her  say,  "What 
a  pleasant  young  man  Mr.  Hepplestall  is,  after  all." 

He  took  time  by  the  forelock  then.  "His  enterprise," 
he  said,  "is  the  talk  of  the  London  clubs.  We  have  not 
been  seeing  what  lies  beneath  our  noses.  They  think 
much  of  Hepplestall  in  London.  They  watch  him  with 
approval." 

"I  confess  I  like  the  way  his  hair  grows,"  said  Mrs. 
Verners,  and  Dorothy  said  nothing. 

V^ile  as  to  Reuben,  there  is  only  one  word  for  the 
mood  in  which  he  rode  home — that  it  was  religious.  Sin- 
cerely and  reverently,  he  thanked  his  God  for  Dorothy 
Verners,  and  to  the  end  he  kept  her  in  his  mind  as  one  who 
came  to  him  from  God.  A  miracle  had  happened — Luke 
was  God*s  instrument  bringing  him  to  that  drawing-room 


THE  MAN  WHO  WON  69 

where  Dorothy  was — and  Reuben  had  a  simple  and   a 
lasting  faith  in  it. 

Not  that  in  the  lump  it  softened  him,  not  that  he 
wasn't  all  the  same  a  devil-worshiper  of  ambition  and 
greed  and  hatred,  for  he  was  all  these  things,  besides  be- 
ing the  humbly  grateful  man  for  whom  God  wrought  the 
miracle  of  Dorothy  Verners.  She  was  on  one  side,  in 
her  place  apart,  and  the  rest  was  as  it  had  been. 

It  may  be  that  his  conduct  to  Bradshaw  resulted  from 
this  religious  mood.  Religion  is  associated  with  the  idea 
of  sacrifice  and  if  the  suffering  was  likely  to  be  Peter's 
rather  than  Reuben's,  Reuben  sacrificed,  at  least,  the 
contemptuous  kindliness  he  felt  towards  Peter.  His  first 
action  was  to  set  in  motion  against  Bradshaw  the  ma- 
chinery by  which  he  had  crushed  other  small  manufac- 
turers out  of  trade. 

In  those  days,  the  power -loom  had  not  become  a  serious 
competitor  of  the  hand-loom  and  the  hand-weavers  chiefly 
worked  looms  standing  in  sheds  attached  to  their  cottages 
or  (for  humidity's  sake,  not  health's)  in  a  cellar  below 
them;  but  they  used  by  now  power-spun  yarn  which  was 
issued  to  them  by  the  manufacturers.  Reuben  had  per- 
mitted Peter  to  go  on  spinning  in  his  factory :  he  now 
sent  round  to  the  weavers  the  message  that  Peter's  yarn 
was  taboo  and  that  if  they  dealt  with  Peter  they  would 
never  deal  with  Hepplestall.  It  was  enough:  the  weavers 
were  implicitly  Reuben's  thralls,  for  without  his  yarn  they 
could  no  longer  rely  on  supplies  at  all.  Peter  was  doomed. 
Reuben  had  not  even,  as  had  been  necessary  at  first,  to  go 
through  the  process  of  undercutting  his  prices ;  he  had 
only  to  tell  the  weavers  that  Peter  was  banned  and  they 
had  no  alternative  but  to  obey. 

So  far  Peter  had  been  allowed,  by  exception,  to  remain 
in  being  as  a  factory-owner,  which  placed  him  on  a  sort 
of  equality  with  Reuben,  as  a  little,  very  little  brother. 


70  HEPPLESTALL'S 

and  now  brotherliness  between  a  Bradshaw  and  the  man 
on  whom  Dorothy  Verners  smiled  was  a  solecism.  Reuben 
could  not  dictate  in  other  districts — jet — but,  in  his  own, 
there  were  to  be  no  people  of  Bradshaw's  caliber  able  to 
say  of  themselves  that  they,  like  Hepplestall,  had  fac- 
tories. There  would  be  consequences  for  Phoebe.  He  did 
not  give  them  a  second  thought.  They  were  what  fol- 
lowed inevitably  from  the  placing  of  Phoebe  by  Dorothy 
Verners,  they  were  neither  right  nor  wrong,  just  nor  un- 
just, they  had  to  be — because  of  what  Dorothy  had  said 
when  she  made,  lightly,  a  dialectical  score  off  Reuben. 

He  left  that  fish  to  fry  and  went  (miraculously  di- 
rected) to  dine  with  the  Verners.  He  dined  more  than 
once  with  the  Verners,  he  was  made  to  feel  that  he  was  at 
home  in  the  Verners  house,  so  that  one  suave  summer  even- 
ing, after  he  had  had  a  pleasantly  formal  and  highly  satis- 
factory little  tete-a-tete  with  Luke  as  they  sat  together 
at  their  wine,  he  led  Doroth}^  through  the  great  window 
on  to  the  lawn  and  found  an  arbor  in  a  shrubbery.  There 
was  no  question  of  her  willingness,  and  it  hardly  surprised 
him  that  there  should  be  none,  for  he  was  growing  accus- 
tomed to  his  miracle  as  one  grows  accustomed  to  any- 
thing. 

"Still,  there  is  a  thing  which  puzzles  me,"  he  said. 
*'You  were  in  London.  Did  you  see  Sir  Harry  Whit- 
worth  there?" 

Dorothy  made  a  hole  in  the  gravel  with  her  toe,  and  the 
hole  seemed  to  interest  her  gravely.  Then  she  looked  up 
slowly  and  met  Reuben's  eye.  "Sir  Harry  Whitworth  is 
nothing  to  me,"  she  said. 

And  he  supposed  Sir  Harry  to  have  proposed  and  to 
have  been  refused,  wliich  was  broad  truth  if  it  wasn't 
literal  fact. 

Refused  Sir  Harry.''  And  why.?  For  him!  The  mir- 
acle increased. 


THE  MAN  WHO  WON  71 


ur 


'This  is  the  crowning  day  of  my  life,"  he  said.  "It  is 
a  day  for  which  I  lived  in  hope.  I  saw  this  day,  I  saw 
you  like  golden  sun  on  a  far  horizon.  That  the  day  has 
come  so  soon  is  miracle."  He  took  her  hand.  "Dorothy 
Verners,  will  you  marry  a  manufacturer?" 

"I  will  marry  you,  Reuben,"  she  said,  and  his  kiss  was 
sacramental. 

He  kissed  her  as  man  might  kiss  an  emblem,  or  the  Holy 
Grail,  with  a  sort  of  dispassionate  passion  that  was  all 
very  well  for  a  symbol  or  a  graven  image,  but  not  good 
enough  for  Dorothy,  who  was  flesh  and  blood. 

"No,  no !"  she  cried.  "Reuben,  what  are  you  thinking 
me.''     I  am  not  like  that." 

"Like  what?"  he  said.     "I  think  you  miracle." 

"Yes,  but  I'm  not.  I'm  a  woman — I'm  not  a  golden 
sun  on  a  far  horizon.     I'm  nearer  earth  than  that." 

"Never  for  me,"  he  protested. 

*'Yes,  always,  please.  Oh,  must  you  drag  confession 
from  me?  I  love  you,  Reuben,  you,  your  straight  clean 
strength.  I  went  in  shadows  and  in  doubt,  I  waded  in 
muddied  waters  until  you  came  and  rescued  me.  You 
touch  me,  and  you  kiss  me  now  as  if  I  were  a  goddess — " 

"You  are  my  goddess,  Dorothy." 

*'I  want  us  to  be  honest  in  our  love.  You've  shown 
me  a  great  thing,  Reuben,  You  have  shown  me  that  there 
is  a  man  in  the  world.  My  man,  and  not  my  god,  and, 
Reuben,  don't  worship  me  either.  Don't  let  there  be  fine 
phrases  and  pretense  between  us  two." 

"Pretense?" 

"The  pretense  that  I  am  more  than  a  woman  and  you 
more  than  a  man." 

"You  are  the  most  beautiful  woman  in  the  world." 

She  was  looking  at  him  quaintly.  "Yes,  if  you  please," 
she  said.  So  long  as  it  was  admitted  she  was  human,  she 
liked  to  be  lifted  in  his  eyes  above  the  rest  of  feminine  hu- 


72  HEPPLESTALL'S 

inanity.  This  was  right,  this  was  reasonable,  this  wasn't 
the  fantastic  blossom  of  love-making  that  must  needs 
wither  in  the  chilly  air  of  matrimony,  this  gave  them  both 
a  chance  of  not  having  to  eat  indigestible  words  after- 
wards, of  not  having  to  allow  in  the  future  that  they  be- 
gan their  life  together  in  a  welter  of  lies.  She  was  a 
woman  and  she  was  beautiful  and  it  was  no  more  than 
right  that  he  should  think  her  woman's  beauty  was  unique. 
"And  I've  told  you  what  I  think  of  you,"  she  said.  "I 
shall  not  change  my  mind  on  that.'* 

"I  shall  never  give  you  need,"  he  said,  but  he  was  find- 
ing this  the  ultimate  surprise  of  all.  "I  had  supposed 
that  women  liked  to  be  wooed." 

"I  think  they  do.  I'm  sure  I  do,  but  I'm  a  plain-dealer, 
Reuben." 

*'I  find  you  very  wonderful,"  he  said,  and  kissed  her  now 
as  she  would  have  him  kiss,  with  true  and  honest  passion 
that  had  respect  in  it  but  wasn't  bleached  with  reverence 
— and  very  sweetly  and  sincerely,  she  kissed  him  back. 

That  was  their  mating  and  she  brought  it  at  once  from 
the  extravagant  heights  where  he  would  have  carried  it, 
into  deep  still  waters.  It  came  quickly,  it  was  to  last 
permanently.  These  two  loved,  and  the  coming  and  the 
lasting  of  their  love  had  no  more  to  do  with  reason  than 
love  ever  has.  If  Mr.  Verners  had  the  impression  that  he 
was  a  guileful  conspirator  who  had  made  this  match,  he 
flattered  himself ;  at  the  most  he  had  only  accelerated  it. 
Inside,  he  sat  looking  forward  to  the  quick  decline  in  his 
table  manners  which  would  follow  upon  the  going  of 
Dorothy  from  his  house;  outside,  two  lovers  paced  the 
lawn  in  happiness,  and  they  did  not  look  forward  then. 
To  look  forward  is  to  imply  that  one's  present  state  can 
be  improved. 

Two  months  ago,  they  were  in  London ;  two  months  ago 
the  idea  that  they  should  entertain  Hepplestall,  the  manu- 


THE  MAN  WHO  WON  73 

facturer,  the  gentleman  who  was,  in  that  tall  Queen  Anne 
Verners  house  which  stood  on  the  site  of  a  Verners  house 
already  old  when  the  Stuarts  came  to  reign,  would  have 
seemed  madness ;  the  house  itself  would  fall  in  righteous 
anger  on  such  a  guest.  Now  he  was  coming  into  the 
drawing-room  with  Dorothy's  hand  in  his,  accepted  suitor, 
welcomed  son.  Sometliing  of  this  was  in  Dorothy's  mind 
as  she  led  him,  solemn-faced  and  twinkling-eyed  round 
the  room.  On  the  walls  in  full  paintings  or  in  miniatures, 
old  dead  Verners  looked  at  her,  and  to  each  she  introduced 
him.  "And  not  one  of  them  changed  their  color,"  she 
announced. 

Mrs.  Verners  had  a  last  word  to  say.  "But  there  is 
Tom."  Young  Tom  Verners  was  with  his  regiment  in  the 
Peninsula. 

"Tom!"  cried  Dorothy.  "I'll  show  you  what  Tom 
thinks  of  this."  She  raised  a  candlestick  to  light  the  face 
of  her  grandfather's  portrait  on  the  wall.  Tom,  they 
said,  was  the  image  of  his  grandfather  who  had  been 
painted  in  his  youth  in  the  uniform  of  a  cornet  of  horse 
when  he  brought  victory  home  with  Marlborough.  She 
waved  the  candle  and  as  she  knew  very  well  it  would,  the 
minx,  its  flicker  brought  to  the  portrait  the  sudden  ap- 
pearance of  a  smile.  "That,"  she  said,  "is  what  Tom 
thinks,"  and  Mrs.  Verners  wept  maudlin  tears  and  felt 
exceedingly  content.  There  was  happiness  that  night  in 
the  Verners  house. 

When  he  had  mounted  his  horse,  and  had  set  off,  she 
came  running  down  the  steps  after  him.  "Stop !"  she 
cried.  "No,  don't  get  off.  Just  listen.  My  man,  my 
steam-man,  I  love  you,  I  love  you,"  and  ran  into  the 
house. 

In  his  own  house,  when  he  reached  it,  he  found  Peter 
and  Phoebe  Bradshaw  waiting  for  him,  sad  sights  the 
pair  of  them,  with  drawn,  suffering  faces  and  the  sense 


74  HEPPLESTALL'S 

of  incomprehensible  wrong  gnawing  at  their  hearts. 
They  couldn't  understand,  they  couldn't  believe;  hours 
ago  they  had  talked  themselves  to  a  standstill,  and  waited 
now  in  silent  apprehensive  misery. 

"Well?"  asked  Reuben. 

"The  weavers  tell  me  of  an  order  of  yours.  I  can't  be- 
lieve— there  must  be  some  mistake." 

"I  gave  an  order." 

"But—" 

"I  gave  an  order.  It  closes  your  factory?  Come  into 
mine.  You  shall  have  an  overlooker's  job."  Peter  was 
silent.  He  was  to  lose  his  factory,  his  position,  his  inde- 
pendence. He  who  had  been  master  was  to  turn  man 
again,  to  go  back,  in  the  afternoon  of  life,  to  the  place 
from  which  as  3'oung  man  he  had  raised  himself.  What 
was  Hepplestall  saying?  "You  had  no  faith  in  steam, 
Bradshaw.  This  is  where  disbelief  has  brought  you.  I 
did  not  hear  your  thanks." 

"Thanks?"  repeated  Peter. 

"I  offer  you  an  overlooker's  job  in  my  factory." 

"But  Reuben,"  said  Phoebe,  "Reuben!" 

He  turned  upon  her  with  a  snarl.  She  used  his  Chris- 
tian name.  She  dared !  "Reuben !"  she  said.  "The  boy. 
Our  boy.     Our  John  ?" 

"He  will  be — what — five  months  old?" 

"Yes,"  she  said. 

"At  five  years  old,  I  take  children  into  the  factory. 
Good-night." 


CHAPTER  VII 

THE  EARLY  LIFE  OF  JOHN  ERADSHAW 

ONCE  upon  a  time,  a  West  Indian  slave  owner  was 
in  conversation  with  three  master-spinners  and  they 
spoke  of  labor  conditions  in  the  North  of  England. 
"Well,"  he  said,  "I  have  always  thought  myself  disgraced 
by  being  the  owner  of  slaves,  but  we  never  in  the  West 
Indies  thought  it  possible  for  any  human  being  to  be  so 
cruel  as  to  require  a  child  of  nine  years  old  to  work 
twelve  and  a  half  hours  a  day,  and  that,  you  acknowledge, 
is  your  regular  practice." 

That,  and  worse,  was  the  early  life  of  John  Bradshaw, 
son  of  Reuben  Hepplestall.  Peter  went  into  Reuben's 
factory :  he  took  the  meatless  bone  Reuben  contemptuously 
threw  to  a  dog:  he  became  an  overlooker.  Once  he  had 
been  a  fighter,  when  he  was  raising  himself  from  the  ranks 
into  the  position  of  a  small  factory  owner:  then  content- 
ment had  come  upon  him  and  fighting  power  went  out  of 
him.  Whom,  indeed,  should  he  fight.'*  He  was  not  en- 
countering a  man  but  a  Thing,  a  System,  which  at  its  first 
onslaught  seemed  to  crush  the  spirit  of  a  people. 

The  later  Hepplestalls  looked  back  to  Reuben,  their 
founder,  and  saw  him  as  a  figure  of  romance.  The  ro- 
mance of  Lancashire  is  rather  in  the  tremendous  fact  that 
its  common  people  survived  this  System  that  came  upon 
them  from  the  unknown,  that,  so  soon,  they  were  hitting 
back  at  the  Thing  which  stifled  life.      Capital,  unaggra- 

vated,  had  been  tolerable;  capital,  aggravated  b}'  steam, 

75 


76  HEPPLESTALL'S 

made  the  Factory  System  and  the  System  was  intolerable. 

Reuben  might  have  chosen  to  make  exceptions  of  the 
Bradshaws,  but  he  did  not  choose  it.  They  had  to  be 
nothing  to  the  husband  of  Dorothy  Hepplestall,  they  had 
to  go,  with  the  rest,  into  the  jaws  of  the  System.  So 
Peter  lost  his.  liberties  and  found  nothing  in  the  steam  ma- 
chines to  parallel  the  easy-going  familiarities  between 
master  and  man  which  had  humanized  his  primitive  fac- 
tory. A  bell  summoned  him  into  the  factory,  and  he  left 
it  when  the  engines  stopped,  which  might  be  twelve  and 
a  half  or  might  be  fifteen  hours  later.  He  gave  good 
work  for  bad  pay  and  liis  prayer  was  that  the  worst  might 
not  happen.  The  worst  was  that  Phoebe  might  be  driven 
with  him  into  the  factory,  and  the  worst  beyond  the  worst 
was  that  Phoebe's  son  might  be  driven  with  her.  So  he 
gave  of  his  best  and  tried  with  a  beaten  man's  despair  to 
hold  off  the  worst  results  of  the  creeping  ruin  that  came 
upon  his  home. 

Reuben  was  guiltless  of  personal  malignancy.  He  had 
decided  that  the  Bradshaws  must  not  be  favorites,  that 
they  must  do  as  others  did,  which  was  a  judgment,  not  a 
spite,  and  Reuben  did  not  control  the  system,  but  was 
controlled  by  it.  He,  like  the  Bradshaws,  must  do  as 
others  did.  He  could,  of  course,  have  got  out:  his  differ- 
ence from  them  was  that  he  could  abjure  cotton.  But 
he  did  not  do  that,  and  so  long  as  he  stayed  in,  a  competi- 
tor with  other  manufacturers,  he  was  obliged,  if  he  would 
survive  commercially,  to  use  the  methods  of  the  rest. 
They  may  or  may  not  have  been  methods  that  revolted 
him  by  their  barbarity,  and  it  is  probable  that,  even  in 
that  callous  age,  what  of  the  true  gentleman  was  left 
in  him  was,  in  fact,  revolted.  That  is,  at  least,  to  be 
deduced  from  the  completely  isolating  veil  he  hung  be- 
tween Dorothy  and  the  factory.  His  house  was  the 
old  home  of  the  Hepplestalls,  near  the  factory  but  not, 


THE  EARLY  LIFE  OF  JOHN  BRADSHAW      77 

like  many  manufacturers'  houses,  adjacent  to  it.  It 
was  sufficiently  far  away  for  him,  practically,  to  live  two 
lives  which  did  not  meet.  He  was  a  manufacturer  and  he 
was  the  husband  of  Dorothj'  Hepplcstall ;  in  the  factory 
one  man  and  at  home  another,  not  lying  at  home  about 
steam  because  there  he  never  spoke  of  it,  preserving  her 
romantic  illusions  about  his  work  by  keeping  her  remote 
from  it.  She  might  have  had  her  curiosities,  but  she  loved 
Reuben,  she  consented  at  his  will  to  be  incurious  and  the 
habit  remained.  It  might  have  remained  even  if  love  had 
fa'^.ed,  but  their  love  was  not  to  fade.  And  the  county 
took  it  that  if  Dorothy  Verners  had  married  a  manufac- 
turer, the  factory  was  not  to  be  mentioned  before  her. 
In  the  presence  of  ladies  they  did  not  mention  it  to 
Reuben,  though,  in  the  bad  times,  when  the  poor-rate  rose 
and  half  the  weavers  came  upon  the  parish,  Reuben  was 
roasted  to  his  face  with  indignant  heat  after  the  ladies 
had  left  the  table. 

He  was  neither  of  the  best  nor  of  the  worst.  He  was  not 
patriarchal  like  the  Strutts  and  the  Gregs  who,  while  con- 
foi-ming  to  the  System,  qualified  it  with  school-houses  and 
swimming  baths,  nor  did  he  go  to  the  extreme  of  order- 
ing his  people  into  the  cottages  he  built  and  compelling 
them  to  pay  rent  for  a  cottage  whether  they  occupied  it 
or  not.  He  didn't  run  shops,  charging  high  prices,  at 
which  his  people  had  to  buy  or  where  they  had  to  take 
goods  in  part  payment  of  wages.  Such  devices,  though 
general,  seemed  to  him  petty  and  extraneous  to  the  fac- 
tory; but  in  the  factory  he  was  a  keen  economist  and  one 
of  the  results  of  the  System  was  that  the  masters  looked 
on  wages  not  as  paid  to  individuals  but  to  families.  That 
was  so  much  the  normal  view  that  a  weaver  was  not  al- 
lowed to  go  on  the  parish  unless  he  proved  that  his  wife 
and  children  worked  in  the  mills  and  that  the  whole  family 
wage  was  inadequate  for  their  support. 


78  HEPPLESTALL'S 

Phoebe  had  to  go  and,  when  he  was  old  enough,  that  is 
to  say  at  five,  John  also  went.  The  legal  age  for  appren- 
tices was  seven — they  were  workhouse  children  bound  to 
the  master  tUl  they  were  twenty-one — but  John  was  a 
"free"  laborer,  so,  until  the  Act  of  1819,  which  made  nine 
years  and  twelve  working  hours  the  minimum,  John  was 
"free"  to  work  at  five,  to  be  a  breadwinner,  to  add  his 
magnificent  contribution  to  the  family  wage  which  kept 
the  Bradshaws  from  the  workhouse. 

The  factory  bell  was  the  leit  motif  of  his  life,  but  the 
Bradshaws  had  a  relic  of  their  past  which  made  them 
envied.  They  had  a  clock,  and  the  clock  told  them  when 
it  was  time  to  get  up  to  go  to  the  factory.  Others,  clock- 
less,  got  up  long  before  they  needed  and  waited  in  the  chill 
of  early  morning,  at  five  o'clock,  for  the  door  to  open. 
The  idea  of  ringing  the  bell  as  a  warning  half  an  hour 
before  working  hours  began  had  not  occurred  to  any  one 
then,  and  people  rose  in  panic  and  went  out,  cutting  short 
sleep  shorter,  stamping  in  snow  (or,  if  snow  is  senti- 
mental, is  it  ever  particularly  joyous  to  rise,  with  a  long 
day's  work  ahead,  at  five  and  earlier.?),  waiting  for  the 
doors  to  let  them  in  to  warmth.  No  one  was  ever  late. 
The  fines  made  it  expensive  to  be  late,  and  the  knocker-up, 
the  man  who  went  round  and  for  a  penny  or  tuppence  a 
week  rattled  wires  at  the  end  of  a  clothes-prop  against 
your  bedroom  window  till  you  opened  the  window  and  sang 
out  to  him — the  knocker-up  was  a  late  Victorian  luxury. 
In  John's  day,  there  was  only  the  factory  bell,  and  one  was 
inside  the  factory  when  it  rang.  The  bell  was  the  sym- 
bol of  the  system,  irritating  the  weavers  especially,  as  the 
power-loom  increased  in  efficiency,  and  drove  more  and 
more  of  them  to  the  factories.  The  spinners,  indeed,  had 
had  the  interregnum  of  the  water-factory :  it  was  not,  for 
them,  a  straight  plunge  into  the  tyranny  of  the  system. 
The  old  hand-weaver,  whose  engine  was  his  arms,  began 


THE  EARLY  LIFE  OF  JOHN  BRADSHAW      79 

and  stopped  work  at  will,  which  is  not  to  say  that  he  was 
a  lazy  fellow,  but  is  to  say  that  he  had  time  to  grow  po- 
tatoes in  a  garden,  to  take  a  share  in  country  sports  and, 
on  the  whole,  to  lead  a  reasonable  life :  and  his  wife  had  the 
art  and  the  time  to  cook  food  for  him.  When  she  worked 
in  the  factory,  she  had  no  time  to  cook,  and  there  was 
nothing  to  cook,  either,  and  if  she  had  worked  from  child- 
hood, she  had  never  learned  how  to  cook,  and  there  was  no 
need.  They  lived  on  bread  and  cheese,  with  precious 
little  cheese.     They  rarely  lived  to  see  forty. 

John,  son  of  Reuben  (though  he  did  not  know  that), 
came  to  the  factory  at  five  in  the  morning  and  left  it,  at 
earliest,  at  seven  or  eight  at  night,  being  the  while  in  a 
temperature  of  75  to  85.  As  to  meal-times,  why,  adults 
got  their  half  hour  or  so  for  breakfast  and  their  hour 
for  dinner  and  the  machinery  was  stopped  so  that  was 
just  the  time  for  tlie  children  to  nip  under  and  over  it, 
snatching  their  food  while  thej'  cleaned  a  machine  from 
dust  and  flue.  Bad  for  the  lungs,  perhaps,  but  the  work 
was  so  light  and  easy.  John,  who  was  small  when  he  was 
five,  crawled  under  the  machines  picking  up  cotton  waste. 

There  was  a  school  of  manufacturers  who  held,  appar- 
ently without  hypocrisy,  that  this  was  a  charming  way  to 
educate  an  infant  into  habits  of  industry:  a  sort  of  work 
in  play,  with  the  cotton  waste  substituted  for  a  ball  and 
the  factory  for  the  nursery.  And  they  called  the  work 
light  and  eas}'. 

John  was  promoted  to  be  a  piecer — he  pieced  together 
threads  broken  in  the  spinning  machines,  and,  of  course, 
the  machine  as  a  whole  didn't  stop  while  he  did  it,  and  it 
was  really  rather  skilled  work,  done  very  rapidly  with  a 
few  exquisitely  skilled  movements:  and  that  was  hardly 
work  at  all,  it  was  more  amusement  than  toil.  Only  one 
Fielden,  an  employer  who,  many  years  later,  tried  the  ex- 
periment for  himself,  found  that  in  following  the  to-and- 


80  HEPPLESTALL'S 

fro  movements  of  a  spinning  machine  for  twelve  hours,  he 
walked  no  less  than  twenty  miles!  Fielden  was  a  re- 
former ;  he  didn't  call  this  light  and  easy  work  for  a  child, 
but  others  did. 

It  would  happen  that — one  knows  how  play  tires  a  child 
— John  would  feel  sleepy  towards  evening.  He  didn't  go 
to  sleep  on  a  working  machine,  or  he  would  have  died,  and 
John  did  not  die  tliat  way:  he  didn't  go  to  sleep  at  all. 
He  was  beaten  into  wakefulness.  Peter  often  beat  him 
into  wakefulness,  and  Peter  did  it  not  because  he  was 
cruel  to  John  but  because  he  was  kind.  If  Peter  had 
not  beaten  him  lightlj^,  other  overseers  would  have  beaten 
him  heavily,  not  with  a  ferule,  but  with  a  billy-roller, 
which  is  a  heavy  iron  stick.  John  also  beat  himself  and 
pinched  himself  and  bit  his  tongue  to  keep  awake.  As  the 
evening  wore  on  it  became  almost  impossible  to  keep  awake 
on  any  terms :  sometimes,  they  sang.  Song  is  the  expres- 
sion of  gladness,  but  that  was  not  why  they  sang.  And 
they  sang — hymns.  It  would  have  been  most  improper 
to  sing  profane  songs  in  a  factory. 

As  to  John's  home  life,  he  went  to  bed :  and  if  it  hadn't 
been  for  Phoebe  or  Peter  who  carried  him,  he  would  often 
not  have  reached  bed.  He  would  have  gone  to  sleep  in 
the  road,  and  because  he  had  never  known  any  other  life 
than  this,  it  was  reasonable  in  him  to  suppose  that  the 
life  he  led,  if  not  right,  was  inevitable. 

He  did  not  suppose  it  for  long.  You  can  spring  sur- 
prises on  human  nature,  you  can  de-humanize  it  for  a  time, 
but  if  you  put  faith  in  the  permanent  enslavement  of  men 
and  women,  you  shall  find  yourself  mistaken.  Even  while 
John  was  passing  from  a  wretched  childhood  to  a  wretched 
adolescence,  the  reaction  was  preparing,  and  mutely, 
hardly  consciously  at  all,  he  was  questioning  if  the  things 
that  were,  were  necessarily  the  things  that  had  to  be. 
There  was  the  death  of  Peter,  in  the  factory,  stopping  to 


THE  EARLY  LIFE  OF  JOHN  BRADSHAW      81 

live  as  a  machine  stops  functionini^  because  it  is  worn  out, 
and  there  was  the  drop  in  their  family  wages,  though  John 
was  earning  man's  pay  then.  And  there  was  the  human 
stir  in  the  world,  the  efforts  of  workers  to  combine  for 
better  conditions,  for  Trade  Unions,  for  Reformed  Parlia- 
ments, and  the  efforts  of  the  ruling  classes,  qualified  b}'  the 
liberalism  of  a  Peel  or  the  insurgency  of  a  Cobbett,  to 
rejjress.  TTiere  were  riots,  machine-breaking,  factory- 
burning,  Peterloo,  the  end  of  a  great  war,  peace  and  dis- 
banded soldier}',  people  who  starved  and  a  panic-stricken 
Home  Secretary  who  thought  there  was  a  revolution. 

]\Iost  of  it  mattered  very  little  to  John,  growing  up  in 
Hepplestall's  factory,  which  escaped  riot.  It  escaped  not 
because  its  conditions  were  not  terrible  but  because  condi- 
tions were  often  more  terrible.  As  employer,  Reuben  trod 
the  middle  way,  and  it  was  the  extreme  men,  the  brutes 
who  seemed  to  glory  in  brutality,  at  whom  riots  were 
aimed.  John  knew  that  there  were  blacker  hells  than  his, 
which  was  a  sort  of  mitigation,  while  mere  habit  was  an- 
other. If  life  has  never  been  anything  but  miserable, 
than  misery  is  life,  and  a'ou  make  the  best  of  it.  One  of 
the  ways  by  which  John  expected  to  make  the  best  of  it 
was  to  marry.  He  married  at  seventeen,  but  when  it  is 
in  the  scheme  of  things  to  be  senile  at  forty,  seventeen  is 
a  mature  age.  The  family  wage  was  also  in  the  scheme  of 
things :  the  exploitation  of  children  was  the  basis  of  the 
cotton  trade:  and  though  love  laughs  at  economics  as 
heartily  as  at  locksmiths,  marriage  and  child-bearing  were 
not  discouraged  by  misery,  but  encouraged  by  it.  John 
did  not  think  of  these  things,  nor  of  himself  and  Annie  as 
potential  pro\aders  of  child-slaves.  He  thought,  illogi- 
cally,  of  h>eing  happy. 

And,  considering  Annie,  not  without  excuse.  She  was 
of  the  few  who  stood  up  straight,  untwisted  by  the  fac- 
tory,  though   it   had   caught   her  young  and   tamed   her 


82  HEPPLESTALL'S 

cruelly.  There  was  gypsy  blood  in  her.  She,  of  a  wan- 
dering tribe,  had  been  taught  "habits  of  industry,"  and 
the  lesson  had  been  a  rack  which,  still,  had  not  broken  her. 
It  hadn't  quenched  her  light,  though,  within  him,  John  had 
the  fiercer  fire.  With  him,  the  signs  of  the  factory  hand 
were  hung  out  for  all  to  see.  Pale-faced  and  stunted,  with 
a  great  shock  of  hair  and  weak,  peering  eyes,  he  was  more 
like  some  underground  creature  than  a  man  living  by  the 
grace  of  God  and  the  light  of  the  sun — he  had  lived  so 
much  of  life  by  the  artificial  light  of  the  factory  in  the 
long  evenings  and  the  winter  mornings ;  but  he  had  a 
kind  of  eagerness,  a  sort  of  Peeping  Tom  of  a  spirit  re- 
fusing to  be  ordered  off,  and  a  suggestion  of  wiriness  both 
of  mind  and  body,  which  announced  that  here  was  one 
whose  quality  declined  obliteration  by  the  System. 

Lovers  had  a  consolation  in  those  days.  Bone-tired  as 
the  long  work-hours  left  them,  it  was  yet  possible  by  a 
short  walk  to  get  out  of  the  town  that  Hepplestall  had 
made.  These  two  were  married,  and  a  married  woman 
had  no  manner  of  business  to  steal  away  from  her  house 
when  the  factory  had  finished  with  her  for  the  day,  but 
that  was  what  Phoebe  made  Annie  do.  That  was  Phoebe's 
tribute  to  youth,  and  a  heavy  tribute,  too.  She,  like 
them,  had  labored  all  day  in  the  factory  and  at  night  she 
labored  in  the  home,  sending  them  out  to  the  moors  as  if 
they  were  careless  lovers  still — at  their  age !  Phoebe  kept 
her  secret,  and  she  had  the  sentiment  of  owing  John 
reparation.  It  was  not  much  that  she  could  do,  but  she 
did  this — grovving  old,  toil-worn,  she  took  the  lion's  share 
of  housework,  she  set  them  free,  for  an  hour  or  so,  to  go 
upon  the  moors.  And  Annie  was  grateful  more  than 
John.  Already,  he  was  town-bred,  already  he  craved  for 
shelter,  already  the  overheated  factory  seemed  nature's 
atmosphere  to  John. 

She  thrcAv  herself  on  the  yielding  heather,  smelling  it. 


THE  EARLY  LIFE  OF  JOHN  BRADSHAW      83 

and  earth  and  air  in  ecstasy,  then  rolled  on  her  back  and 
looked  at  the  stars.  "Lad,  lad,"  she  cried,  "there's  good 
in  life  for  all  that." 

"Aye,  wench,"  he  said,  "there's  you." 

*'Me?  There's  bigger  things  than  me.  There's  air 
and  sky  and  a  world  that  is  no  beastly  reek  and  walls  and 
roofs." 

"It's  cold  on  the  moor  to-night,"  he  said,  shivering. 

She  threw  her  shawl  about  him.  "You're  clemmed,'* 
she  said,  drawing  him  close  to  the  generous  warmth 
of  her.  "Seems  to  me  I  come  to  life  under  the  stars. 
Food  don't  matter  greatly  to  me  if  there's  air  as  I  can 
breathe." 

"We're  prisoned  in  yon  factory,  Annie.  Reckon  I'm 
used  to  the  prison.     There's  boggarts  on  the  moor." 

She  laughed  at  his  fears.  "Aye,  you  may  laugh,"  he 
said,  "but  there  was  a  gallows  up  here,  and  boggarts  of 
the  hanged  still  roam." 

The  belief  in  witches,  ghosts  and  supernatural  visitants 
of  all  kinds  was  a  common  one  and  it  was  not  discouraged 
by  educated  people  who  hoped,  probably,  to  reconcile  the 
ignorant  to  the  towns  by  allowing  terrifying  superstitions 
of  the  country  to  remain  in  circulation.  But  Annie's 
gypsy  strain  kept  her  immune  from  any  such  fears:  her 
ancestors  had  traded  in  superstition.  "And,"  he  went  on 
seriously,  "when  the  Reformers  tried  to  meet  on  Cronkey- 
shaw  Moor,  it's  a  known  fact  that  there  were  warlocks 
seen."  What  was  seen  was  a  body  of  men  grotesquely 
decked  in  the  semblance  of  the  popular  notion  of  a  wizard, 
with  phosphorescent  faces  and  so  on.  Somebody  was 
using  a  better  way  to  scotch  Reform  than  soldiers,  but  the 
trick  was  soon  exposed  and  meetings  and  drillings  on  the 
moors  were  phenomena  of  the  time. 

"You  make  too  much  o'  trouble  o'  all  sorts,  John,"  she 
said. 


84.  HEPPLESTALL'S 

"I  canna  keep  fro'  thinking,  Annie,"  he  apologized. 
**I'm  thinking  now." 

'Aye,  of  old  wives'  tales,"  she  mocked. 
'No.     I'm  thinking  of  my  grandfer  and  of  Hepple- 
stall's  factor3%" 

"I'm  in  the  air,"  she  said.  "That's  good  enough  for 
me."  She  was  slightly  jealous  of  John,  who  had  known 
his  grandfather.  Very  soundly  established  people  had 
known  two  grandfathers :  John  had  known  one,  but  Annie 
none.  However,  he  was  not  to  be  prevented  from  speak- 
ing his  thought. 

"I've  heard  my  grandfer  tell  o'  times  that  were  easier 
than  these.  He  had  a  factory  o'  his  own — what  they 
called  a  factory  them  days.  Baby  to  Hepplestall's  it 
were.  I'll  show  you  its  ruin  down  yonder  by  the  stream 
some  day.  He's  dead  now,  is  grandfer.  Sounds  wonder- 
ful to  hear  me  talk  of  a  grandfer  wi'  a  factory  o'  his  own." 

"Fine  lot  of  good  to  thee  now,  my  lad.  I  never  had 
no  grandfer  that  I  heard  on,  but  I  don't  see  that  it  makes 
any  difference  atween  thee  and  me  to-day." 

"I'm  none  boasting,  Annie,"  he  said.  "I'm  nobbut 
looking  back  to  the  times  that  used  to  be.  Summat's 
come  o'er  life  sin'  then,  sunmiat  that's  like  a  great  big 
cloud,  on  a  summer's  day." 

"Well,"  said  Annie,  "we've  the  factory.  But  there's 
times  like  this  when  I've  my  arms  full  of  you  and  my  head 
full  of  the  smell  of  heather.  And  there's  times  like  mis- 
chief-neet" — that  is,  the  night  of  the  first  of  May — "and 
th'  Rush-Bearing  in  August.  I  like  th'  Wakes,  lad  .  .  . 
oh,  and  lots  of  times  that  aren't  all  factory.  There's 
Easter  and  Whitsun  and  Christmas."  There  were:  there 
were  these  survivals  of  a  more  jocund  age,  honored  still, 
if  by  curtailed  celebrations.  The  trouble  was  that  the 
curtailments  were  too  severe,  that  neither  of  cakes  nor  ale, 
neither  of  bread  nor  circuses  was  there  sufficient  offset 


THE  EARLY  LIFE  OF  JOHN  BRADSHAW      85 

against  the  grinding  hardships  of  the  factories.  Both 
John  and  Annie  had  so  recently  emerged  from  the  status 
of  child-slavery  that  the  larger  life  of  adults  might  well 
have  seemed  freedom  enough;  to  Annie,  aided  by  Phoebe's 
sacrifice,  to  Annie,  living  more  physically  than  John,  to 
Annie,  who  rarely  looked  beyond  one  short  respite  unless 
it  was  to  the  next,  the  present  seemed  not  amiss.  Except 
the'  life  of  the  roads  and  the  heaths',  to  which  she  saw  no 
possibility  of  return,  from  which  the  factory  had  weaned 
her,  she  had  no  traditions,  while  he  had  Peter  Bradshaw 
for  tradition.  He  had  slipped  down  the  ladder,  and  there 
was  resentment,  usually  dormant,  of  the  fact  that  he  saw 
no  chance  to  climb  again. 

"Things  are,"  was  her  philosoph}'.  "I'm  none  in  fac- 
tory now,  and  I'm  none  fretting  about  factory  and  you'd 
do  best  to  hold  your  hush  about  your  grandfer,  John. 
His'n  weren't  a  gradely  factory." 

That  was  it.  She  accepted  Hepplestall's,  while  John 
accepted  the  habit  of  Hepplestall's,  dully,  subterraneously 
resenting  it.  She  almost  took  a  pride  in  the  size  of 
Hepplestall's.  "And,"  she  said,  good  Methodist  as  she 
was,  "there's  a  better  life  to  come." 

He  had  no  reply  to  make  to  that.  The  Methodist  waa 
the  working  class  religion,  ast  opposed  to  the  Church  of 
the  upper  classes  and,  at  first,  the  rulers  had  seen  danger 
in  it,  and  in  an  unholy  alliance  of  Methodism  with  Reform. 
There  was  something,  but  not  a  great  deal  in  their  fear. 
There  was  the  fact,  for  instance,  that  in  the  Methodist 
Sunday  Schools  reading  and  writing  were  taught.  "The 
modern  Methodists,"  says  Bamford  in  his  "Early  Days," 
*'may  boast  of  this  feat  as  their  especial  work.  The 
church  party  never  undertook  to  instruct  in  writing  on 
Sundays."  That  far,  but  not  much  farther,  the  Metho- 
dists stood  for  enlightenment.  Cobbett  gave  them  no 
credit  at  all.     He  said,  in  1824,  "the  bitterest  foes  of  free- 


86  HEPPLESTALL'S 

dom  in  England  have  been,  and  are,  the  Methodists." 
Annie  had  "got  religion" :  the  sufferings  and  the  hardships 
of  this  life  were  mere  preparations  for  radiant  happiness 
to  come,  and  a  religion  of  this  sort  was  not  for  citizens 
but  for  saints ;  it  gave  no  battle  to  the  Devil,  Steam. 

John  stirred  uncomfortably  in  her  arms.  He  had  an 
aching  sense  of  wrong,  be^^ond  expression  and  beyond  re- 
lief. If  he  tried  to  express  it,  his  fumbling  words  were 
countered  by  her  opportuni.'^m  and,  in  the  last  resort,  by 
her  religion.  Things  were,  and  there  was  nothing  to  be 
done  about  them. 


CHAPTER  VIII 


THE  LONELY  MAN 


A  MAN  with  a  foot  in  two  camps  is  likely  to  be  wel- 
comed in  neither  and  to  be  lonely  in  his  life.  The 
cotton  manufacturers  had  grown  rich,  they  were  estab- 
lished, they  were  a  new  order  threatening  to  rival  in  wealth 
and  power  the  old  order  of  the  land  interest,  and  they 
were  highly  self-conscious  about  it.  Land  had  no  valid 
cause  to  be  resentful  of  the  new  capitalists.  Land  was 
hit  by  the  increase  in  the  poor  rates,  but  handsomely  com- 
pensated for  that  by  the  rise  in  land  values.  But  a  new 
power  had  arisen  and  land  was  jealous  of  its  increasing  in- 
fluence in  the  councils  of  the  nation. 

Reuben  never  forgot  that  he  belonged  to  the  old  order, 
was  of  it,  and  had  married  into  it.  In  business  affairs, 
it  was  necessary  to  have  associations  with  other  manufac- 
turers, but  he  had  no  hospitalities  at  home  for  them  on 
the  occasions  when  they  met  to  discuss  measures  of  com- 
mon policy.  He  entertained  them  at  the  factory,  he  kept 
home  and  affairs  in  separate  water-tight  compartments, 
and  was  loved  of  none.  He  was  his  own  land-owner  and 
his  own  coal-owner,  both  long  starts  in  the  race,  and  he 
was  at  least  as  efficient  and  enterprising  as  his  average 
competitor.  A  gentleman  had  come  into  trade  and  had 
made  a  great  success  of  it.  More  galling  still,  he  insisted 
that  he  remained  a  gentleman  in  the  old  sense,  a  landed 

man,  "county."     Not  in  words  but  by  actions  and  inac- 

87 


88  HEPPLESTALL'S 

tlons  which  bit  deeper  than  any  words  he  proclaimed  his 
superiority. 

And  why  not?  He  was  superior,  he  was  the  husband 
of  Dorothy  Hepplestall  and  it  was  that  fact — the  fact 
that  he  had  married  Dorothy  and  made  a  success  of  their 
marriage — which  counted  against  him  with  the  county  far 
more  than  his  having  gone  into  trade  and  having  made  a 
success  of  that.  They  would  have  welcomed  a  failure 
somewhere,  and  he  had  failed  at  nothing.  So  though  he 
had  their  society,  he  had  it  gi'udgingly. 

He  was  then  driven  back,  not  unwillingly,  on  Dorothy. 
She  was,  for  Reuben,  the  whole  of  friendship,  the  whole 
of  companionship,  the  whole  of  love ;  after  all,  she  was 
Dorothy  and  certainly  he  made  no  complaint  that  he  had 
no  other  friends  and  that  he  was  a  tolerated,  unpopular 
figure  in  society.  His  days  were  for  the  factory,  his  even- 
ings for  Dorothy  and  their  children  and,  when  the  chil- 
dren had  gone  to  bed,  for  Dorothy  and  his  books.  Books, 
though  they  were  not  unduly  insisted  upon  in  the  country 
districts  of  Lancashire,  went  then  with  gentlemanliness 
and  Reuben  was  not  idiosyncratic,  but  normal,  in  becom- 
ing bookish  in  middle-age.  In  Parliament  they  quoted  the 
classics  in  their  speeches,  and  the  Corinthian  of  the  Clubs, 
whatever  his  sporting  tastes,  spared  time  to  keep  his 
classics  in  repair.  Bookishness,  in  moderation,  was  part 
of  the  make-up  of  a  man  of  taste,  and  for  Reuben  it  had 
become  a  recourse  not  for  fashion's  sake  but  for  its  own. 

Life  for  Reuben  had  its  mellowness;  he  had  struggled 
and  he  had  won ;  he  was  owner  and  despot,  hardly  bound 
by  any  law  but  that  of  his  will,  of  the  several  factories 
contained  within  the  great  wall,  of  a  coal-mine,  of  the 
town  of  cottages  and  shops  about.  The  conditions  of 
labor  were  the  usual  conditions  and  they  did  not  trouble 
his  conscience.  Things  were,  indeed,  rather  smoother  for 
Hepplestall's  workers  than  for  some  others ;  he  was  above 


THE  LONELY  MAN  89 

petty  rent  exactions  and  truck  shops,  as,  being  his  own 
coal  supplier,  he  could  very  well  afford  to  be. 

What  drawbacks  there  were  to  his  position  were  rather 
in  matters  of  decoration  than  reality,  but  it  was  decided 
proof  of  his  unpopularity  in  both  camps  of  influence  that 
Hepplestall  was  not  a  magistrate.  Other  great  manufac- 
turers, to  a  man,  were  on  the  bench  and  took  good  care  to 
be,  because  administration  of  the  law  was  largely  in  the 
hands  of  the  magistrates  and  the  manufacturers  wanted 
the  administration  in  trusty  hands — their  own.  It  was 
a  permanent  rebuff  to  Reuben  that  he  was  not  a  magis- 
trate ;  there  were  less  wealthy  High  Sheriffs. 

It  was  a  puny  irritation,  symptomatic  of  their  spite, 
and  it  didn't  matter  much  to  Reuben,  who  was  sure  of  his 
realities,  sure,  above  all,  of  the  reality  of  Dorothy's  love. 
No  love  runs  smooth  for  twenty  years  and  probably  it 
would  not  be  love  if  it  did,  but  only  a  bad  habit  masque- 
rading as  love,  so  that  it  would  not  be  true  to  say  of 
Reuben  and  Dorothy  that  they  had  never  had  a  difference. 
They  had  had  many  small  differences,  and  in  this  matter 
of  love  what  happens  is  that  which  also  happens  to  a  tree. 
Trees  need  wind ;  wind  forces  the  roots  down  to  a  stronger 
and  ever  stronger  hold  upon  the  earth.  And  so  with 
love,  which  cannot  live  in  draughtless  hothouse  air,  but 
needs  to  be  wind-tossed  to  prove  and  to  increase  its 
strength.  Impossible  to  be  a  pacifist  in  love !  Love  is  a 
tussle,  a  thing  of  storms  and  calms :  like  everything  in  life 
it  cannot  stand  still  but  must  either  grow  or  decay,  and 
for  growth,  it  must  have  strife.  Sex  that  is  placid  and 
love  that  is  immovable  are  contradictions  in  terms.  Love 
has  to  interest  or  love  will  cease  to  be,  and  to  interest  it 
cannot  stagnate. 

The  children  came  almost  as  milestones  In  the  road  of 
their  love ;  each  marked  the  happy  ending  of  a  period  of 
stress.     They  were  not  results  of  a  habit,  but  the  achieve- 


90  HEPPLESTALL'S 

ments  of  a  passion,  live  symbols  of  a  thing  itself  alive. 
These  two  hearts  did  not  beat  all  the  time  as  one,  and  the 
restlessness  of  their  love  was  as  essential  as  its  harmony. 

But  the  shadow  of  a  difference  that  might  grow  into  a 
disaster  was  being  cast  upon  them.  In  a  way,  it  was  ex- 
traneous to  their  love,  and  in  another  way  was  part  and 
parcel  of  it.  The  question  was  the  future  of  Edward,  the 
eldest  son. 

Dorothy  lived  in  two  worlds,  in  Reuben  and  in  the 
county,  and  Reuben  lived  in  three,  Dorothy,  the  factory 
and  the  county.  He  put  the  factory  second  to  Dorothy 
and  she  put  it  nowhere.  There  was  a  bargain  between 
them,  unspoken  but  understood,  that  she  should  put  it  no- 
where and  yet  he  was  assuming,  tacitly,  that  Edward  was 
as  a  matter  of  course  to  succeed  him  as  controller  of  the 
factory  and  the  mine :  of  these  two  he  always  thought  first 
of  the  factory  and  second  of  the  mine. 

She  might  have  reconciled  herself  to  the  mine.  There 
.were  Dukes,  like  the  Duke  of  Bridgewater,  who  owned 
coal-mines  and  her  Edward  might  have  gained  great 
honor,  like  that  Duke,  by  developing  canals.  But  she  had 
not  moved  with  the  times  about  factories,  nor,  indeed,  had 
the  times,  that  is,  her  order  of  the  old  gentry,  moved  very 
far.  The  Seccombes  were  still  exceptional,  the  Luke 
Verners  still  trimmers,  land  was  still  land  and  respectable, 
steam  was  steam  and  questionable,  and  it  is  to  be  supposed 
that  though  the  coal  of  the  Duke  was  used  to  make  steam, 
coal  was  land  and  therefore  on  the  side  of  the  angels, 
whatever  the  devils  did  with  it  afterwards.  Prejudice,  in 
any  case,  has  nothing  to  do  with  consistency.  She  had 
no  prejudice  against  Reuben's  connection  with  the  fac- 
tory; he  was  her  "steam-man"  still,  but  she  did  not  want 
Edward  to  be  her  steam-son. 

Edward  himself  was  conscious  of  no  talent  for  factory 
owning  and  hardly  of  being  the  son  of  a  factory  owner. 


THE  LONELY  MAN  91 

The  management  of  her  children's  lives  was  in  Dorothy's 
hands,  involving  no  mention  of  the  factory,  and  in  her 
hands  Reuben  was  content  to  leave  their  lives  until  his 
sons  had  had  the  ordinary  education  of  gentlemen,  until 
they  were  down  from  their  Universities^  He  had  not  suf- 
fered himself  as  a  manufacturer  because  he  was  educated 
as  a  gentleman  and  saw  no  reason  to  bring  up  his  sons 
any  differently  from  himself.  Throw  them  too  young  into 
the  factory,  and  they  would  become  manufacturers  and 
manufacturers  only :  he  had  the  wish  to  make  them  gentle- 
men first  and  manufacturers  afterwards. 

Edward  had  ideas  of  his  own  about  his  future,  and  it 
came  as  a  surprise  to  be  invited  at  breakfast  to  visit  the 
factory  one  day  during  vacation  from  Oxford.  Instinc- 
tively he  glanced,  not  at  his  mother,  but  at  liis  clothes. 
He  was  not  precisely  a  dandy,  but  had  money  to  burn  and 
burned  a  good  deal  of  it  at  his  tailor's. 

"The  factory,  I  said,  not  the  coal-mine,"  Reuben  said, 
noting  his  son's  impulse.  "You  have  looked  at  your 
clothes.  Now  let  us  go  and  look  at  the  first  cause  of  the 
clothes.  As  a  young  philosopher  you  should  be  interested 
in  first  causes." 

"Oh,  is  it  necessary,  Reuben.?"  pleaded  Dorothy. 

"Sparks  should  know  where  the  flames  come  from,"  said 

Reuben. 

"I  have  great  curiosity  to  see  the  factory,  sir,"  said 
Edward.  "I  showed  surprise,  but  that  was  natural. 
You  have  hidden  the  factory  from  us  all  as  if  it  were  a 
Pandora's  box  and  if  you  judge  the  time  now  come  when 
I  am  to  see  the  place  from  wliich  our  blessings  come,  I 
assure  you  I  am  flattered  by  your  confidence.  But  I 
warn  you  I  am  not  persuaded  in  advance  to  admire  the 

box." 

Reuben  smiled  grimly  at  his  hinted  opposition.     "If 
you  look  with  sense,  you  will  admire,"  he  said.     "Fac- 


92  HEPPLESTALL'S 

tories  run  to  usefulness,  not  beauty.  Shall  we  go?" 
They  went,  and  Reuben  exhibited  his  factory  with 
thoroughness,  with  the  zest  of  a  man  who  had  created  it, 
but  now  and  then  with  the  impatience  of  the  expert  who 
does  not  concede  enough  to  the  slow-following  thought  of 
the  lay  mind.  Edward  began  with  every  intention  to  ap- 
preciate, but  as  Reuben  explained  the  processes,  found 
nothing  but  antipathy  grow  witliin  him. 

He  breathed  a  foul,  hot,  dust-laden  air,  he  hadn't  a  me- 
chanical turn  of  mind  and  was  mystified  by  operations 
which  Reuben  imagined  he  expounded  lucidly.  Once  the 
thread  was  lost,  the  whole  affair  was  simply  puzzlement 
and  he  had  the  feeling  of  groping  in  a  fog,  a  liideously 
noisy  fog,  where  wheels  monotonously  went  round,  spin- 
ning mules  beat  senselessly  to  and  fro  and  dirty  men  and 
women  looked  resentfully  at  him.  It  seemed  to  him  a  hell 
worse  than  any  Dante  had  described,  with  sufferers  more 
hopeless,  bound  in  stupid  misery.  He  was  not  thinking 
of  the  sufferers  with  any  great  humanitarianism :  thej 
were  of  a  lower  order  and  this  no  doubt  was  all  that  they 
were  fit  for.  He  was  thinking  of  them  with  disgust,  ob- 
jecting to  breathe  the  same  air,  revolted  by  their  smells, 
but  he  was  conscious  of,  at  least,  some  sentiment  of  pity. 
If  he  had  understood  the  meaning  of  it  all,  he  felt  that 
he  would  have  seen  things  like  these  in  true  perspective, 
but  he  missed  the  keys  to  it,  was  nauseated  when  he  ought 
to  have  been  interested  and  his  attempted  queries  grew  less 
and  less  to  the  point. 

Reuben  perceived  at  last  that  he  was  lecturing  an  inat- 
tentive audience.  "Come  into  the  office,"  he  said,  and  in 
that  humaner  place,  with  its  great  bureau,  its  library  of 
ledgers  and  its  capacious  chairs  for  callers,  where  the 
engine  throbbed  with  a  diminished  hum,  Edward  tried  to 
collect  his  thoughts.  "This,"  Reuben  emphasized,  "is 
where  I  do  my  work.     I  go  through  the  factory  twice  a 


THE  LONELY  MAN  93 

day,  otherwise,  I  am  to  be  found  in  here.  A  glass  of  wine 
to  wash  the  dust  out  of  your  throat?" 

Edward  was  grateful :  but  wine  could  not  wash  his  re- 
pugnance away.  "Well,  now,"  asked  Reuben,  "what  do 
you  think?" 

'Frankly,  sir,  I  am  hardly  capable  of  thought." 

'No,"  said  Reuben  meditatively.  "No.  Its  bigness 
takes  the  breath  away." 

But  Edward  was  not  thinking  of  bigness.  "If  I  say 
anything  now  which  appears  strange  to  you,  I  hope  you 
will  attribute  it  to  my  inexperience.  I  am  thinking  of 
those  people  I  have  seen.  To  spend  so  many  hours  a  day 
in  such  conditions  seems  to  me  a  very  dreadful  thing." 

*'Work  has  to  be  done,  Edward,  and  they  are  used  to 
it.  You  will  find  that  there  are  only  two  sorts  of  people 
in  this  world,  the  drivers  and  the  driven."  He  leaned  for- 
ward in  his  chair.     "Which  are  you  going  to  be?" 

"I?"  The  personal  application  caught  him  unawares, 
then  he  mentally  pulled  himself  together.  If  he  was  in  for 
it,  he  could  meet  it. 

"I  did  not  bring  you  here  as  an  idle  sight-seer.  At  first 
blush  you  dislike  the  factory,  but  it  is  my  belief  that  you 
will  come  to  like  it  as  well  as  I  do."  Edward  stared  at 
his  father  who  was,  he  saw,  serious.  He  veritably  *'liked" 
the  factory.  "In  fact,"  Reuben  was  saying,  "I  can  go 
further.  I  love  this  place.  I  made  it;  it  is  my  life's 
work;  and  I  am  proud  of  it.  Hepplestall's  is  a  great 
heritance.  When  I  hand  it  on  to  you,  it  will  be  a  great 
possession,  a  great  trust.  How  great  you  do  not  know 
and  if  I  showed  you  now  the  figures  in  those  books  you 
would  be  no  wiser.  As  yet  you  do  not  understand.  Even 
out  there  in  the  works  where  things  are  simple  you  missed 
my  meaning,  but  there  is  time  to  learn  it  all  before  I  leave 
the  reins  to  you." 

"I  am  to  decide  now.?" 


94.  HEPPLESTALL'S 

**Decide?     Decide?     Wliat   is  there   to   decide?     You 

are  my  eldest  son." 

Edward  made  an  effort:  Reuben  was  assuming  his 
consent  to  everything.  "May  I  confess  my  hope,  sir? 
My  hope  was  that  when  I  had  finished  at  Oxford,  you 
would  allow  me  to  go  to  the  bar." 

"The  bar?  A  cover  for  idleness."  Sometimes,  but 
Edward  had  not  intended  to  be  idle.  The  bar  was  an 
occupation,  gentlemanly,  settling  a  man  in  London 
amongst  his  Oxford  friends ;  it  seemed  to  Edward  that  the 
bar  would  meet  his  tastes.  If  it  had  been  land  that  he 
was  to  inherit,  naturally  he  would  have  taken  a  share  in 
its  management,  but  there  was  no  land:  there  was  a  fac- 
tory, and  he  felt  keen  jealousy  of  Tom,  his  younger 
brother.  It  was  settled  that  Tom  should  follow  his  uncle, 
Tom  Verners,  who  was  Colonel  Verners  now,  into  the 
Army,  while  he,  the  eldest  son,  who  surely  should  have 
first  choice,  he  was  apparently  destined  will  he,  nill  he,  for 
this  detestable  factory ! 

*'I  will  have  no  son  of  mine  a  loafer.  You  would  live 
in  London?" 

"I  should  hope  to  practice  there." 

"I'll  have  no  idlers  and  no  cockneys  in  my  family, 
Edward.  Hepplestall's  !  Hepplestall's !  and  he  sneers  at 
it." 

"Oh,  no,  sir.  Please.  Not  that.  I  feel  it  difficult  to 
explain." 

"Don't  try." 

**I  must.  I  think  what  I  feel  is  that  if  we  were  speak- 
ing of  land  I  as  your  eldest  son  should  naturally  come  into 
possession.  I  should  feel  it,  in  the  word  you  used,  as  a 
trust.     But  we  are  not  speaking  of  land." 

Reuben  gripped  his  chair-arms  till  his  hands  grew  white 
and  recovered  a  self-control  that  had  nearly  slipped  away. 
The  boy  was  ready  to  approve  the  law  of  primogeniture 


THE  LONELY  MAN  95 

so  long  as  he  could  be  fastidious  about  his  Inheritance,  so 
long  as  the  inheritance  was  land.  As  it  was  not  land,  he 
wanted  to  run  away.  He  deprecated  steam.  He  dared, 
the  jackanapes!  "No,"  said  Reuben,  "we  are  not  speak- 
ing of  land.     We  are  speaking  of  Hepplestall's." 

*'If  it  were  land,"  Edward  went  on  ingenuously,  "how- 
ever great  the  estate,  you  would  not  find  me  shirking  my 
responsibility." 

"I  see.  And  as  it  is  not  land.''  As  it  is  this  vastly 
greater  thing  than  land?"  Then  suavity  deserted  him. 
*'Boy,"  he  cried,  "don't  3'ou  see  what  an  enormous  thing 
it  is  to  be  trustee  of  Hepplestall's  ?" 

"Oh,"  said  Edward,  "it  is  big.     But  let  me  put  a  case." 
*'What.''     Lawyering  already.''"  scoffed  Reuben. 
"Suppose  one  dislikes  a  cat.     Fifty  cats  don't  reconcile 
one." 

*'You  dislike  the  factory.'"' 
*'I  may  not  fully  understand — " 
"Then  wait  till  you  do.      Come  here  and  learn." 
*'That  would  be  the  thin  end  of  the  wedge." 
"It  is  meant  to  be,"  said  Reuben,  and  on  that  their 
conversation    was,    not    Inopportunely,    interrupted.     A 
clerk  knocked  on  the  door  and  announced  Mr.  Needham. 
*'Don't  go,  Edward,"  said  Reuben,  "this  can  figure  as  a 
detail  In  your  education,"  and  introduced  liis  son  to  the 
caller. 

Edward  looked  hopelessly  at  the  visitor.  Reuben  had 
told  him  that  the  office  was  the  place  where  his  business 
life  was  spent  and  therefore  Edward's  contacts,  if  he  came 
to  the  factory,  would  not  be  with  the  squalid  people  he  had 
seen  at  work,  but  with  people  who  visited  the  office.  He 
looked  at  Mr.  Needham,  and  decided  that  he  had  never  seen 
a  coarser  or  more  brutal  man  in  his  life.  There  were  cer- 
tain fellows  of  his  college  justly  renowned  for  grossness; 
there  was  the  riffraff  of  the  town,  tliere  were  hangers-on 


96  HEPPLESTALL'S 

at  the  stables,  there  were  the  bruisers  he  had  seen,  but  in 
all  his  experience  he  had  seen  nothing  comparable  with 
the  untrammeled  brutishness  of  Mr.  Richard  Needham. 
If  this  was  the  company  he  was  asked  to  keep,  he  pre- 
ferred— what  did  one  do  in  extremis?  Enlist?  Well, 
then,  he  preferred  enlistment  to  the  factory. 

Needham  was,  however,  not  quite  the  usual  caller,  who 
was  a  merchant  come  to  buy,  or  a  machinist  come  to  sell, 
rather  than,  as  Needham  was,  a  manufacturer  and  a  no- 
torious one  at  that.  By  this  time,  the  repeal  of  the  Com- 
bination Acts  had  given  Trade  Unionism  an  opportunity 
to  develop  in  the  open,  and  manufacturers  who  had  known 
very  well  how  to  deal  with  the  earlier  guerilla  warfare  of 
the  then  illegal  Unions  were  seriously  alarmed  by  its  prog- 
ress. There  was  a  strong  movement  to  force  the  reenact- 
ment  of  the  Combination  Laws.  Contemporaneously,  the 
growth  and  proved  efficiency  of  the  power-loom  drove  the 
weavers  to  extremes.  Needham  was  self-appointed  leader 
of  the  reactionaries  amongst  the  manufacturers :  a  man 
who  had  risen  by  sheer  physical  strength  to  a  position 
from  which  he  now  exercised  considerable  influence  over 
the  more  timid  of  the  masters. 

He  had  the  curtest  of  nods  for  Edward.  "My  God, 
Hepplestall,  we're  in  for  a  mort  of  trouble,'*  he  said, 
mopping  his  brow  with  a  huge  printed  handkerchief  and 
putting  his  beaver  hat  on  the  desk.  He  sank  into  a  stout 
chair  which  groaned  under  his  weight,  and  Edward 
thought  he  had  never  seen  anything  so  indecent  as  the 
swollen  calves  of  Mr.  Needham. 

Reuben  silently  passed  the  wine.  It  seemed  a  good 
answer. 

Warts  are  a  misfortune,  not  a  crime:  but  the  wart  on 
Mr.  Needham's  nose  struck  Edward  as  an  obscenity — and 
his  father  loved  the  factory !     He  didn't  know  that  he  was 


THE  LONELY  MAN  97 

unduly  sensitive,  but  certainly  Needham  on  top  of  his 
view  of  the  workpeople  made  him  queasy. 

Needham  emptied  and  refilled  a  glass.  "I'd  hang  every 
man  who  strikes,"  he  said,  "Look  at  'em  here,"  he  went 
on,  producing  a  hand-bill  which  he  offered  to  Reuben. 

"After  the  peace  of  Amiens,"  it  read,  "the  wages  of  a 
Journeyman  Weaver  would  amount  to  2/71/2  P^r  day  or 
15/9  per  week,  and  this  was  pretty  near  upon  a  par  with 
other  mechanics  and  we  maintained  our  rank  in  society. 
We  will  now  contrast  our  present  situation  with  the  past, 
and  it  will  demonstrate  pretty  clearly  the  degraded  state 
to  which  we  have  been  reduced. 

"During  the  last  two  years  our  wages  have  been  re- 
duced to  so  low  an  ebb  that  for  the  greatest  part  of  that 
time  we  have  .  .  .  the  Journeyman's  Wages  of  9d  or 
lOd  a  day  or  from  4/6  to  5/—  per  week,  and  we  appeal  to 
your  candor  and  good  sense,  whether  such  a  paltry  sum 
be  sufficient  to  keep  the  soul  and  body  together." 

"What  do  you  think  of  that.?"  asked  Needham.  "Print- 
ing it,  mind  you,  spreading  sedition  and  disaffection  like 
that.  Not  a  word  about  their  wives  and  children  all 
takken  into  the  factories  and  all  takking  good  wages  out. 
If  commerce  isn't  to  be  unshackled  and  free  of  the  at- 
tacks of  a  turbulent  and  insurrectionary  spirit,  I  ask 
you,  where  are  we.''  Wliere's  our  chance  of  keeping  law 
and  order  when  the  law  permits  weavers  to  combine  and 
yap  together  and  issue  bills  like  yond?  It's  fatal  to  al- 
low 'em  to  feel  their  strength  and  communicate  with  each 
other  without  restraint.  Allow  them  to  go  on  uninter- 
rupted and  they  become  more  licentious  every  day.  What 
do  you  say,  Hepplestall  ?" 

"Why,  sir,  it's  you  who  are  making  a  speech,  and  I 
may  add  a  speech  containing  many  very  familiar  phrases." 

"A^'e,  I've  said  it  before,  and  to  you.     I  might  have 


98  HEPPLESTALL'S 

spared  my  breath.  But  hast  heard  the  latest?  Dost 
know  that  the  strikers  in  Blackburn  destroyed  every 
power-loom  within  six  miles  of  the  town  and  ... 
and  .  .  ."  Mr.  Needham  drew  in  breath  .  .  .  "and 
they've  been  syringing  cloth  wi'  vitriol.  Soft  sawder  in 
yond  hand-bill,  'appeal  to  your  candor  and  good  sense,' 
aye  and  vitriol  on  good  cloth  when  it  comes  to  deeds." 

"Yes,  I  heard  of  that.  A  nasty  business,  though  I 
understand  the  authorities  have  dealt  strongly  with  the 
outbreak." 

"A3'e,  you're  a  philosopher,  because  it  happened  at  a 
distance  from  you.  It's  some  one  else's  looms  that's 
smashed,  and  some  one  else's  cloth  that's  rotted.  What 
if  it  were  youm,  Hepplestall?" 

"We  don't  have  Luddites  here." 

"You  allays  think  you're  out  of  everything.  Now  I've 
brought  you  the  facts  and  you  know  as  well  as  I  do  what's 
the  cause  of  this  uppishness  of  the  lower  orders.  It's 
Peel,  damn  him.  One  of  us,  and  ought  to  know  better. 
Sidmouth's  the  man  for  my  money.  Sidmouth  and 
Castlereagh.  There  was  sense  about  when  they  were  in 
charge.  Now,  we  let  the  spinners  combine  and  the 
weavers  combine  and  they're  treading  on  our  faces.  Well, 
are  you  standing  by  3'our  lonesome  as  usual  or  are  you 
in  it  with  the  rest  of  us  to  petition  against  workmen's  com- 
binations?    That's  a  straight  question,  Hepplestall." 

"I  shall  take  time  to  answer  it,  Mr.  Needham.  I  have 
acted  with  3'ou  in  the  past  and  I  have  taken  leave  to 
doubt  the  wisdom  of  your  actions  and  I  have  on  such  oc- 
casions acted  neither  with  you  nor  against  you.  This 
time—" 

"This  time,  there's  no  chance  of  doubt." 

"But  I  do  doubt,  sir.  I  doubt  whether  a  factory,  con- 
trolled by  a  strong  hand,  has  anything  to  fear  from  Work- 
men's Combinations." 


THE  LONELY  MAN  99 

"Damn  it,  look  at  Blackburn !" 

"You  shall  have  my  decision  when  it  is  ready.     At  this 

moment,  I  tell  you  candidly  I  do  not  incline  to  join  you." 

"But  union  is  strength.     They've  combined.     So  must 


we." 


"We  always  have,  in  essentials.  I  promise  you  I  will 
give  this  matter  every  thought." 

Needham  looked  angry,  and  then  a  cunning  slyness 
passed  across  his  face.  "I'm  satisfied  with  that,"  he  said. 
"Aye,  I'm  satisfied,  though  you  may  tell  me  I've  come  a 
long  road  to  be  satisfied  wi'  so  little  at  the  end  o'  it." 

Reuben  rose,  bowing  gravely.  "I  am  glad  to  have 
satisfied  you,  Mr.  Needham,"  he  said,  blandly  ignoring  the 
hint  that  an  invitation  to  dinner  was  the  natural  expec- 
tation of  a  traveled  caller. 

"Aye,"  said  Needham,  "Aye."  He  finished  the  bottle, 
since  nothing  more  substantial  was  forthcoming,  and  rose 
to  go.     "Then  I'll  be  hearing  from  you?" 

"Yes,"  Reuben  assured  liim.  "I  will  see  you  to  your 
horse." 

"Nay,  you'll  not.  They  don't  breed  my  make  of  horse. 
I've  a  coach  at  door,  and  extra  strong,  too." 

*'Then  I  will  see  you  to  your  coach."  Needham  nodded 
to  the  silent  Edward,  and  went  out  with  Reuben.  There 
was  no  strategical  issue  between  Needham  and  Hepple- 
stall.  Needham,  when  he  spoke,  used  phrases  taken  from 
the  writings  of  manufacturers  more  literate  than  himself, 
and  so  stated,  by  such  a  man,  his  point  of  view  sounded 
preposterously  obscurantist.  But  it  was,  in  essence, 
Reuben's  view  also,  with  the  difference  that  Reuben  looked 
on  attempts  to  combat  the  principle  of  Unionism  as  tac- 
tical error.  The  Combination  Acts,  he  felt,  had  gone  for 
ever,  and  the  common  policy  of  the  masters  should  not  be 
in  the  direction  of  reviving  those  Acts  but  of  meeting  the 
consequences  of  their  repeal. 


100  HEPPLESTALL'S 

He  was,  indeed,  habitually  averse  from  open  association 
with  his  fellow  manufacturers  because  of  his  self-conscious 
social  difference,  and,  where  such  a  man  as  Needham  led, 
was  apt  to  pick  more  holes  in  his  policy  than  were  reason- 
able. It  was  quite  likely  in  the  present  case  that  he  would 
come  round  to  Needham's  view,  but  certainly  he  would 
not  hurry.  The  troubles  at  Blackburn  were  remote  from 
him  and  he  felt  his  own  factory  was  out  of  the  danger 
zone,  and  that  if  he  threw  in  his  weight  with  the  Needham 
petition  it  would  be  altruistically,  and  perhaps  a  waste  of 
influence  which  could  have  found  better  employment.  His 
own  people  were  showing  no  signs  of  restiveness,  and  he 
didn't  think  Unionism  was  making  much  headway  amongst 
them.  Reason  and  self-interest  seemed  allied  with  his 
native  individualism  to  resist  Needham's  policy. 

He  returned  to  find  Edward  staring  gloomily  at  his 
boots.  "Well,  Edward.'^"  he  asked  cheerily.  *'Did  you 
like  your  lesson?" 

"The  thing  I  liked,  sir,  the  only  thing  I  liked,  is  that 
you  are  not  to  act  with  Mr.  Needham." 

"Am  I  not.?" 

"It  did  not  sound  so.  Tell  me,  is  that  a  fair  specimen 
of  the  type  of  man  you  meet  in  business.'"* 

*'No.     In  many  ways  he  is  superior  to  the  most.*' 

"Superior !     That  fat  elephant !" 

"Needham  is  one  of  the  strongest  men  in  the  cotton 
trade,  Edward." 

"Oh,  I  called  him  elephant.     Elephants  have  strength." 

"And  strength  is  despicable?" 

"No.     But—'* 

"But  Needham  is  a  gross  pill  to  swallow.  Well,  if  it 
will  ease  your  mind,  I  do  not  propose  to  act  with  him  on 
this  issue.  You  need  not  swallow  this  pill,  Edward.  But 
I  am  not  looking  to  a  son  of  mine  to  be  a  runaway  from 
duty,  to  be  a  loiterer  in  smooth  places.     You  have  Oxford 


THE  LONELY  MAN  101 

which  is,  I  hope,  confirming  you  as  a  gentleman  and  you 
have  the  factory  which  will  confirm  you  as  a  man.  I 
could  make  you  an  appeal.  I  could  first  point  out  that  I 
am  single-handed  here  in  a  position  which  grows  beyond 
the  strength  of  any  single  pair  of  hands.  I  could  dub 
you  my  natural  ally  at  a  time  when  I  have  need  of  an  ally. 
But  I  shall  make  you  neither  an  appeal  nor  a  command. 
Hepplestall's  is  a  greater  thing  than  I  who  made  it  or 
than  you  who  will  inlierit  it,  and  there  is  no  occasion  for 
pressure.     You  are,  naturally,  inevitably,  in  its  service." 

Edward  felt  rather  than  saw  that  somewhere  at  the 
opening  of  the  well  down  which  this  plunged  him  there 
was  daylight.  "I  do  not  perceive  the  inevitability,"  he 
cried.     "You  doom  me  to  a  monstrous  fate." 

"You  are  heroical,"  said  Reuben,  "but  as  to  the  inevi- 
tability, take  time,  and  you  will  perceive  it." 

"Daylight!  Give  me  the  daylight!"  was  what  Edward 
wanted  to  say,  but  he  repressed  that  and  hardly  more 
happily  he  asked,  "Is  there  no  beauty  in  life?" 

*'There  is  beauty  in  Hepplestall's,"  said  Reuben,  and 
meant  it.     He  had  created  Hepplestall's. 


LIBRARY 
UNIVERSITY  Q?  CALIFORNIA 
RIVERSIDE       •    ■•' 


CHAPTER  IX 


THE   SPY 


EDWARD'S  "fat  elephant"  drove  from  HepplestalPs 
meditating  his  retort  to  Reuben's  intransigeancy. 
He  held  that  it  was  necessary  to  weld  the  manufacturers 
into  a  solid  phalanx  of  opposition  to  the  legalizing  of 
Trade  Unions,  and  that  if  Reuben  were  allowed  to  stand 
out,  other  masters,  whom  Needham  regarded  as  weak- 
kneed,  would  stand  out  with  him.  Needham  was  obsti- 
nate and  unscrupulous,  with  a  special  grudge  against  "kid- 
gloved"  Hepplestall,  and  if  there  were  no  overt  manifesta- 
tions of  discontent  in  Hepplestall's  factory,  his  business 
was  to  provoke  them.  There  was  surely  latent  discon- 
tent there  as  everywhere  else  and  the  good  days  of  Sid- 
mouth  and  Castlereagh  had  shown  what  could  be  achieved 
in  the  way  of  manufacturing  riot  by  the  use  of  informers. 
Informers  were  paid  to  inform,  and  lost  their  occupation 
if  no  information  were  forthcoming;  they  did  not  lose 
their  occupation ;  they  were  agents  provocateurs,  and  Gen- 
tleman Hepplestall  was,  if  Needham  knew  right  from  left, 
to  be  thwacked  into  line  by  the  activities  of  an  informer. 

He  hadn't  much  difficulty — he  was  that  sort  of  man — ^in 
laying  hands  upon  a  suitable  instrument.  The  name  of 
the  instrument  was  Thomas  Barraclough,  and  it  was,  in- 
deed, in  Needham's  hands  already  working  as  a  weaver 
in  his  factory,  not,  to  be  sure,  for  the  purpose  of  provok- 
ing unrest  there  but  merely  for  decent  spying.     There 

is  honesty  in  spying  as  in  other  things  and  the  decent  spy 

102 


THE  SPY  103 

is  the  observer  and  reporter  of  what  others  do  spontane- 
ously ;  the  indecent  spy  is  he  who  instigates  the  deeds  he 
afterwards  reports.  Barraclough  was  quite  willing,  for  a 
higher  fee,  to  undertake  to  prove  to  Hepplestall  that 
Trade  Unions  were  murder  clubs. 

The  affair  was  not  stated,  even  by  blunt  Needham  to 
his  spy,  with  quite  such  candor  as  this.,  but,  "If  tha'  sees 
signs  o'  trouble  yonder,  tell  me  of  'em ;  and  if  tha'  sees 
no  signs  tha's  blinder  than  I  tak'  thee  for,"  was  a  suf- 
ficiently plain  direction  to  an  intelligent  spy,  and  Bar- 
raclough nodded  comprehendingly  as  he  went  off  to  begin 
his  cross-country  tramp  to  Hepplestall's. 

A  spy  who  looks  like  a  spy  is  disqualified  at  once,  but 
what  are  the  symptoms  of  spying?  What  signs  does  spy- 
ing hang  out  on  a  man  that  we  shall  know  him  for  a  spy? 
Is  he  bent  with  a  life  spent  in  crouching  at  kej'holes?  A 
keen-eyed,  large-eared  ferret  of  a  man?  The  fact  is  that 
Barraclough  was  small  and  bent,  and  ferretty,  that  he 
looked  like  your  typical  spy  and  yet  did  not  look,  in  the 
Lancashire  of  those  days,  any  different  from  a  famished 
weaver.  They  were  "like  boys  of  fifteen  and  sixteen  and 
most  of  them  cannot  measure  more  than  5  feet  2  or  3 
inches." 

Steam  fastened  on  this  generation,  stunting  it,  twisting 
it,  blasting  it,  and  if  Barraclough  had  been  reasonably 
tall,  reasonably  well-made  and  nourished  he  would  have 
been  marked  at  once  as  something  different  from  the 
workers  who  were  to  accept  him  as  one  of  themselves.  So, 
in  spite  of  looking  like  a  spy,  he  was  qualified  to  be  a  spy 
in  Hepplestall's  because  he  looked  like  any  other  under- 
grown,  underpaid,  underfed  weaver  lad. 

And  there  is  good  in  all  things,  though  Hepplestall  was 
not  thinking  of  the  Blackburn  riots  as  good  when  he  was 
cavalier  about  them  with  Needham.  There  was  the  good, 
for  Hepplestall's,  that  the  destruction  of  the  Blackburn 


104  HEPPLESTALL'S 

looms  and  their  products  brought  an  exceptional  rush  of 
orders  to  Reuben ;  and  Thomas  Barraclough,  applying  for 
work  Avhen  he  ended  his  tramp  at  the  factory  gates,  found 
himself  given  immediate  employment. 

He  found,  too,  that  as  an  honest  spy  he  had  no  occupa- 
tion in  this  place.  He  could  report  distress,  sullen  suffer- 
ing and  patient  suffering;  he  could  report  the  ordinary 
things  and  would  have  to  say,  in  honesty,  that  here  the 
ordinary  things  had  extraordinary  mitigations ;  and  he 
found  nothing  of  the  violent  flavor  expected  by  Needham. 
It  remained  for  him  to  take  the  initiative  and  to  provide 
against  disappointing  his  master's  expectations,  but  the 
mental  sketch  he  had  made  of  himself  as  an  effective  ex- 
plosive did  not  seem  likely  to  be  justified  in  any  hurry. 
The  Blackburn  riots  had  not  been  followed  by  such  fero- 
city of  punishment  as  had  befallen  the  Luddites  a  few 
years  previously,  but  there  had  been  men  killed  by  soldiera 
during  the  riots:  there  were  ten  death  sentences  at  Lan- 
caster Assizes,  reduced  afterwards  to  transportation  for 
life:  and  thirty-three  rioters  were  sent  to  prison.  That 
was  fairly  impressive,  as  it  was  meant  to  be,  but  much 
more  impressive  was  the  appalling  distress  which  quite 
naturally  fell  upon  the  Blackburn  people  who  had  de- 
stroyed the  looms,  and  if  all  this  was  salutary  from  the 
point  of  view  of  law  and  order  it  was  excessively  inoppor- 
tune from  the  special  point  of  view  of  Mr.  Barraclough. 

Here  he  was,  under  orders  to  raise  tumult,  in  a  place 
where  not  only  were  there  no  symptoms  of  tumult,  but 
where  those  who  might  possibly  be  tumultuously  disposed 
were  cowed  by  the  tales,  many  true  and  many  exagger- 
ated, of  Blackburn's  sufferings.  The  malignant  irony  of 
the  uses  of  the  agent  provocateur  was  never  better  ex- 
emplified, but  it  wasn't  for  Needham's  trusty  informer  to 
chew  upon  that,  but,  whatever  his  diflRculties,  to  get  on 
with  his  incitements.     And  he  soon  decided  that  Hepple- 


THE  SPY  105 

stall's  people,  in  the  mass,  were  "windbags,"  that  is,  they 
would  listen  to  him  and  they  would,  in  conversation,  be  as 
vehement  as  he,  but  their  vehemence  was  in  words  not 
deeds  and  only  deeds  were  of  any  use  to  Barraclough. 
The  method  of  the  Luddites,  machinery-smashing,  was  dis- 
credited for  ever  by  the  Blackburn  example  and  he  gave 
up  hope  of  any  large-scale  demonstration  at  Hepple- 
stall's.  What  was  left  was  the  possibility  of  finding  some 
individual  who  was  capable  of  being  influenced  to  violent 
action. 

Then,  just  as  he  was  despairing  of  finding  the  rightly 
malleable  material,  Annie  Bradshaw's  second  son  was  bom 
and  Annie  Bradshaw  died.  She  had  been  almost  luxuri- 
ously careful  about  the  birth  of  her  first  child:  she  had 
left  the  factory  three  days  before  his  birth  and  had  not 
returned,  with  the  child  at  her  breast,  for  a  full  week 
afterwards ;  but  second  babies  were  said  to  come  more 
easily,  wages  were  needed  and  she  had  lifted  heavy  beams 
before.  The  child  was  bom  on  the  factory  floor,  it  lived 
and  Annie  died.  There  was  no  extraordinary  pother 
made  about  her  death,  because  women  were  continually  de- 
fying steam  in  this  way  and  most  of  them  survived  it. 
Annie  did  not  survive.     She  was  unlucky.     That  was  all. 

"Don't  fret  for  me,  lad,"  she  gasped  to  John.  "I'm  go- 
ing through  the  Golden  Gates.  Tak'  care  o'  the  childer." 
The  engine  did  not  stop — guns  do  not  cease  fire  because  a 
soldier  falls  on  the  battlefield — and  to  John  Bradshaw, 
nineteen,  widower  with  two  infant  sons,  it  beat  a  devil's 
tattoo  of  stunning  triumph.  There  were  women  gathered 
around  her  bod}',  somewhere  a  woman  was  washing  his  son, 
but  he  was  seeing  nothing  of  them,  nothing  of  the  life  that 
had  come  through  death.  Annie  was  gone  from  him,  his 
glorious  Annie  of  the  winds  and  the  moorsi,  lying  white 
and  silent  on  the  oily  floor  of  a  stinking  factory,  and  al- 
ready the  women  were  leaving  her,  already  they  were  re- 


106  HEPPLESTALL'S 

turning  to  their  several  places.  If  they  gave  him  sym- 
pathy, they  took  bread  out  of  their  mouths  and  sympathy 
must  be  so  brief  as  to  appear  callosity.  It  was  not 
callosity,  and  he  knew  it ;  knew,  too,  that  he  did  not  want 
long-winded  condolences  or  any  condolences  at  all,  yet 
their  going  so  quickly  from  that  white  body  seemed  to 
him  a  stark  indecency  adding  to  the  monstrous  debt  Steam 
owed  him. 

He  was  thinking  of  the  small  profanities  of  this  death 
rather  than  of  the  death  itself.  He  hadn't  realized  that 
yet,  he  was  probing  his  way  through  the  attendant  cir- 
cumstances to  the  depths  of  his  tragedy.  He  knew  that 
he  would  never  lie  beneath  the  stars  again  with  Annie 
while  the  breeze  soughed  through  the  heather  and  she 
crooned  old  songs  of  the  roads  in  his  ear :  he  knew,  but  he 
did  not  believe  it  yet.  She  had  been  so  utterly  protective 
of  him.  If  she  took  down  her  hair,  and  held  it  from  her, 
and  he  crept  beneath  its  curious  warmth,  what  had 
mattered  then?  He  had  loved  her  and  by  the  grace  of 
Phoebe — though  he  was  not  thinking  of  Phoebe  now — they 
had  been  given  leave  to  love  and  to  enjoy  each  other  in 
the  hours  which  were  not  the  factory's. 

The  engine  thumped  horribly  on  his  ear  and  a  gust  of 
passionate  hatred  struggled  to  make  itself  articulate. 
"You  fiend  !"  he  cried.     "Curse  3'ou,  curse  you !" 

When  an  overseer  came  to  tell  him  that  a  hand-cart  was 
at  the  gates  to  take  Annie's  body  and  the  baby  home,  and 
that  Phoebe  might  go  with  him,  he  was  lying,  dazed,  on 
the  floor  and  mechanically  did  what  he  was  told  to  do. 
He  had  no  volition  in  him,  and  Mr.  Barraclough,  profes- 
sional observer,  noting  both  his  hysteria  and  his  stupor 
decided  that  he  had  found  his  man  at  last.  Providence 
had  ordained  that  Annie  should  die  to  make  an  instrument 
for  Richard  Needham's  emissaiy. 


THE  SPY  107 

In  the  days  of  her  youth,  Phoebe  had  her  follies  as  she 
had  her  prettiness ;  now,  schooled  by  adversity,  an  old 
woman  of  forty,  she  was  without  illusions  as  she  was  with- 
out comeliness;  she  had  nothing  but  her  son,  and,  hidden 
like  a  miser's  gold,  her  hatred  of  the  Hepplestalls,  of 
Reuben  who  betrayed  her,  of  Dorothy  whom  he  married, 
of  his  sons  who  stood  where  her  son  should  have  stood. 
For  two  seconds  she  was  weakened  now,  for  two  seconds 
as  she  folded  Annie's  baby  in  her  shawl  and  held  him 
closely  to  her  she  had  the  thought  that  she  must  go  to 
Reuben  with  a  plea  for  help,  then  put  that  thought  away. 

**Don't  worry  your  head  about  the  childer,  lad,"  she 
said,  *'I'll  manage."  She  would  work  in  the  factory,  she 
would  order  their  cottage,  she  would  rear  the  babies,  she 
would  pay  some  older  woman  who  was  past  more  active 
work  a  small  sum  (but  the  accepted  rate)  to  look  after 
the  babies  while  she  was  in  the  factory.  She  would  take 
this  burden  off  his  shoulders  as  she  had  taken  the  burden 
of  housework  off  Annie's.  She  had  permitted  John  and 
Annie  to  enjoy  the  luxury  of  love  and  now  she  was  per- 
mitting John  the  luxury  of  woe.  She  said  that  she  would 
"manage,"  he  knew  the  enormous  implications  of  the  word, 
but  knew,  because  she  said  it,  that  she  would  keep  her 
promise.  There  was  no  limit  to  his  faith  in  Phoebe  and 
he  touched  her  shoulder  gently,  undemonstratively,  saying 
in  that  simple  gesture  all  his  unspeakable  gratitude,  ac- 
cepting what  she  gave  not  because  he  underrated  it,  not 
because  he  did  not  understand,  but  because  it  was  the  only 
thing  to  do. 

For  her  his  touch  and  his  acceptance  were  abundance 
of  reward.  Go  to  Hepplestall !  Take  charity,  when  this 
sustaining  faith  was  granted  her?  Oh,  she  would  manage 
though  her  body  cracked.  It  was  a  soiling  and  a  shame- 
ful thought  that  these  babes  were  Reuben's  grandchildren. 


108  HEPPLESTALL'S 

They  were  not  his  and  John,  please  God,  would  never 
know  who  was  his  father ;  they  were  hers  and  John's  and 
they  two  would  keep  them  for  their  own. 

It  wasn't  bravado  either.  It  wasn't  a  brief  heroical 
resolution  begotten  of  the  emotions  caused  by  Annie's 
death.  She  counted  the  cost  and  chose  her  fight,  spum- 
ing the  thought  of  Hepplestall  as  if  the  justice  he  might 
do  her  were  an  obscenity.  She  knew  what  she  undertook 
to  do  and,  providing  only  that  she  had  ten  more  years  of 
life,  she  would  do  it. 

John,  mourning  for  Annie,  was  not  too  sunk  in  grief 
to  be  unaware  of  the  fineness  of  his  mother.  Would  Annie 
— she  who  loved  her  life — have  said  "Things  are,"  if  she 
had  foreseen  how  soon  the  things  which  were  bad  were  to 
be  so  infinitely  worse  .f*  The  factory  had  killed  her,  it  had 
taken  his  Annie  from  him,  it  had  put  upon  his  mother  in 
her  age  the  burden  she  took  up  vrith  a  matter  of  fact 
resignation  that  seemed  to  him  the  ultimate  impeachment 
of  the  system  which  made  heroism  a  commonplace. 

"Mother !"  he  cried.     "Mother !" 

*'Eh,  lad,"  she  said,  *'we've  got  to  take  what  comes." 

She  did  not,  at  least,  as  Annie  did,  answer  his  inarticu- 
late revolt  with  religion,  but  she  had  fundamentally  the 
same  resignation  to  the  things  of  this  world,  and  for  the 
same  reason.  She,  too,  looked  forward  to  a  radiant  life 
above:  she  saw  in  her  present  troubles  the  hand  of  God 
justly  heavy  upon  one  who  had  been  a  light  woman. 
John,  knowing  nothing  of  that  secret  source  of  her  hu- 
mility, attributed  all  to  the  one  cause,  to  the  Factory 
which  crushed  and  maimed  and  killed  in  spirit  as  in  body. 
He  refused  his  acceptance,  his  resignation.  There  was, 
there  must  be,  something  to  be  done.     But  what.'*     What? 

First,  at  any  rate,  Annie  had  to  be  buried  with  the  cir- 
cumstance which  seemed  to  make  for  decency  and  for  that 
they  had  provided  through  the  Benefit  Society.     ThiS" — 


THE  SPY  109 

decent  burial — was  the  first  thought  behind  the  weekly 
contributions  paid,  heaven  knows  at  what  sacrifice,  to  the 
Society  and  they  were  rewarded  now  in  the  fact  that 
Annie  was  not  buried  at  the  expense  of  the  parish.  That 
was  all,  bare  decency,  not  the  flaunting  parody  with 
plumes  and  gin  of  the  slightly  less  poor:  nor  were  there 
many  mourners.  Leave  was  given  to  a  select  few  to  be 
absent  for  an  hour  from  the  factory,  and  the  severe  fines 
for  unauthorized  absence  kept  the  numbers  strictly,  with 
one  exception,  to  the  few  the  overseer  chose  to  privilege. 
Phoebe  and  John  were  granted  the  full  day,  ^vithout  fine, 
and,  of  course,  without  wage,  and  so,  it  appeared,  was 
Mr.  Barraclough.  But  Mr.  Barraclough  was  on  busi- 
ness, and  the  fine  that  he  would  have  to  pay  would  figure 
in  the  expenses  he  would  charge  Mr.  Needham. 

One  or  two  old  women — old  in  fact  if  not  in  years,  in- 
capacitated by  the  factory,  for  the  factory — had  been  at 
the  graveside  and  were  going  home  with  Phoebe,  and  it  was 
natural  that  John  should  hold  out  his  hand  to  Bar- 
raclough, this  unexpected,  this  so  self-sacrificing  sym- 
pathizer and  that  they  should  fall  into  step  as  they  moved 
away  together. 

"Man,  I  had  to  come.  I'm  that  sorry  for  thee.  Com- 
ing doan't  mean  much  for  sure,  but — '* 

"It  means  a  daj*s  wages,  choose  how,"  said  John,  who 
knew  that  Barraclough  was  not  of  the  few  who  had  been 
granted  an  hour's  leave  to  come. 

Barraclough  nodded.  "And  a  fine,  an'  all,"  he  said, 
"but  that  all  counts  somehow.  Seems  to  me  if  it  weren't 
costing  me  summat,  it  u'd  not  be  the  same  relief  it  is  to 
my  feelings.  I  didna  come  for  thy  sake,  I  came  to  please 
masel',  selfish  like.  I  had  to  get  away  from  yond  damned 
place  that  murdered  her.  I  couldna'  stand  the  sight  o'  it 
to-day." 

"Murdered  her!"  said  John.     He  had,  no  doubt,  used 


110  HEPPLESTALL'S 

that  word  in  thought,  but  it  had  seemed  to  him  audacious, 
a  thought  to  be  forbidden  utterance.  And  here,  sham- 
ing him  for  his  mildness  was  one,  an  outsider,  a  stranger, 
who,  untouched  intimately  by  Annie's  death*,  yet  spoke  of 
it  outright  as  murder.  John  felt  that  he  was  failing 
Annie,  that  he  had  not  risen  to  his  occasion,  that  it  was 
this  other,  this  fine  spirit,  who  could  not  "stand  the  sight'* 
of  the  factory  on  the  day  of  her  funeral,  who  had  risen 
to  the  occasion  more  worthily  than  John,  who  was  Annie's 
husband.  "Aye,"  he  said  somberly,  "it  was  murder." 
"You  never  doubted  that,  surely,"  said  Barraclough. 
"Oh,"  said  John,  "when  a  woman  dies  in  childbirth — " 
"Aye,  but  fair  treated  women  don't.  What  art  doing 
now?  I  mean  for  the  rest  of  the  day.  Looking  at  it 
from  my  point  of  view,  I  might  as  well  tak'  the  chance  to 
get  out  o'  sight  o'  yond  hell-spot.  I'm  going  on  moors 
for  a  breath  of  air.  Wilt  come.?  Better  nor  settin'  to 
hoam  brooding,  tha'  knows." 

His  point  was  simply  to  get  John  in  his  emotional 
crisis  to  himself,  but  luck  was  with  him  in  his  proposal 
further  than  he  knew.  For  John,  the  moors  were  a  re- 
minder of  Annie  at  her  sunniest,  but  for  the  moment  all 
that  he  was  thinking  of  was  that  strange  instinct  for  the 
sympathetic  stranger  rather  than  for  the  sympathy,  too 
poignant  to  be  borne,  of  his  mother.  And  he  did  not  wish 
to  see  his  sons  that  day. 

"  'Tis  better  nor  brooding,"  he  agreed,  and  went. 
There  was  virtue,  he  thought,  in  talking.  Phoebe  was  all 
reserve  and  action,  and  on  this  which  resolved  itself  into 
a  day  off  from  the  factory,  she  would  be  very  active  in  her 
house.  He  was  quite  sure  that  he  did  not  want  to  go 
home.  Exercise  for  his  legs,  air  for  his  lungs  and  the 
conversation,  comprehending  but  naturally  not  too  inti- 
mate, of  this  kindly  stranger — these  were  the  things  to 
get  him  through  the  day. 


THE  SPY  111 

But  the  conversation  of  Mr.  Barraclough  was  not  cal- 
culated to  be  an  anodyne. 

"Thank  God,  we've  gotten  our  backs  to  it.  We're 
walking  away  from  yond  devilry,  we've  our  faces  to 
summat  green."  How  often  had  he  not  heard  something 
like  that  from  Annie!  "It  beats  me  to  guess  what  folks 
are  made  of,  both  the  folk  that  stand  factories  and  t'other 
folks  that  drive  'em  into  factories.  I  know  I've  gotten 
an  answer  to  some  of  this  under  my  bed  where  I 
lodge  and  I'll  mak'  the  answer  speak  one  of  these  days 
an'  all." 

"An  answer.?  What  answer.''  I've  looked  and  found 
no  answer." 

"No.f*  They  looked  at  Blackburn  and  found  th'  wrong 
answer  an'  all,  th'ould  answer  that  the  Luddites  found  and 
failed  wi'.  Smashing  machines !  Burning  factories ! 
What's  the  good  o'  that.'*  They  nobbut  put  up  new  fac- 
tories bigger  and  more  hellish  than  before  and  mak'  new 
machines  that'll  do  ten  men's  work  instead  of  two.  Aye, 
they  were  on  wrong  tack  in  them  days.  They  were  afraid 
to  get  on  right  tack." 

'Is  there  a  tack  that's  right?"  he  asked. 

'There's  shooting,"  said  Barraclough. 

*'Shooting.''  Tha'  canna  shoot  an  engine,  nor  a  fac- 
tory." 

"No,  and  that's  the  old  mistake.  Trying  to  hit  back 
at  senseless  brick  and  iron.  There's  men  beliind  the  fac- 
tories, men  that  build  and  men  that  manage.  Men  that 
own  and  tak'  the  profits  of  our  blood  and  death.  For  in- 
stance, who  killed  thy  wife.'"' 

"Why  .  .  .  why  .  .  ."  hesitated  John,  who  was  still 
intrigued  obscurely  with  the  idea  that  he,  the  father  of 
her  child,  was  author  of  her  death. 

"She  died  o'  th'  conditions  o'  Hepplestall's  factory  and 
yo'  canna'  bring  yer  verdict  o'  willful  murder  against  con- 


112  HEPPLESTALL'S 

ditlons.     Yo'  bring  it  against  the  fiend  that  made  the  con- 
ditions.    Yo'  bring  it  against  Reuben  Hepplestall.'* 

"Maister  Hepplestall !" 

"Aye,  Maister.  Maister  o'  us  fra'  head  to  heel. 
Maister  o*  our  lives  and  deaths,  and  gotten  hisseP  so  high 
above  us  that  I  can  see  tha's  scared  to  hear  me  talk  that 
road  of  him."  That  was  true,  Barraclough  seemed  to 
John  almost  blasphemous.  Hepplestall  was  high  above 
them,  so  that  to  make  free  with  his  name  in  this  manner 
was  something  outrageous.  "Aye,  the  spunk's  scared  out 
of  thee  by  the  name  of  Hepplestall  as  if  tha'  were  a  cliild 
and  him  a  boggart.  But  I  tell  thee  this,  he  isna  a  bog- 
gart. He's  a  man  and  if  my  bullet  gets  him,  he'll  bleed 
and  if  it  gets  him  in  the  right  place,  he'll  die,  and  there'll 
be  one  less  in  the  world  o'  the  fiends  that  own  factories 
and  murder  women  to  mak'  a  profit  for  theirselves." 

"You'd  do  that !     You !" 

"Some  one  must  do  the  job.  Th'  gun's  to  hoam  under 
my  bed,  loaded  an'  all.  Execution  of  a  murderer,  that's 
what  it'll  be.     Justice  on  the  man  that  killed  thy  wife.'* 

John<  halted  abruptly.  "What's  to  do?"  asked  Bar- 
raclough. "Let's  mak'  th'  most  of  this  day  out  o'  fac- 
tory. Folks  like  thee  and  me  mustna'  think  too  much 
of  causes  o'  things.  The  cause  of  this  day  off  was  thy 
wife's  death,  but  we've  agreed  tha's  not  to  brood.  So 
come  on  into  sunshine  and  mak'  the  most  of  what  we've 
gotten." 

"We'll  mak'  tlie  most  of  it  by  turning  to  hoam,"  said 
John. 

"Thy  hoam's  no  plaice  for  thee  to-day." 

"No.  But  thy  hoam  is,"  said  John.  "I  want  to  see 
yon  gun.  I'm  thinkin'  that'll  be  a  better  sight  for  me  nor 
all  the  heather  in  Lankysheer." 

"For  tliee?"  Mr.  Barraclough  was  greatly  surprised. 
**Nay,  I  doubt  I  was  wise  to  mention  my  secret  to  thee.'* 


THE  SPY  113 

"Art  coming?"  John  was  striding  resolutely  home- 
wards. 

"Well,  seeing  I  have  mentioned  it,  I  suppose  there's  no 
partiklar  harm  in  showing  it.  O'  course,  tha'  canna'  use 
a  gun?" 

"Can't  I?  No,  you're  reight  there.  I'm  not  much  of 
a  man,  am  I?  As  tha'  told  me,  I've  gotten  no  spunk,  but 
I've  spunk  enough  now.  It  weren't  more  than  not  see- 
ing clear  and  tha's  cleared  things  up  for  me  wonnerful.'* 

"I  have?     How?" 

"Tha'  can  shoot,  if  I  canna',  Barraclough."  Which 
was  disappointing  to  the  spy,  who  thought  things  were 
going  better  than  this. 

Still  he  could  bide  his  time  and  "Aye,  I  can  shoot,"  he 
said.     "I've  been  in  militia." 

"Then  tha'  can  teach  me,"  said  John,  to  Mr.  Bar- 
raclough's  relief.     "I'll  be  a  quick  learner." 

"Well,  as  tha's  interested,  I'll  show  thee  how  a  trigger's 
pulled,"  and  Barraclough  was,  in  fact,  not  intending  to 
go  further  than  that  in  musketry  instruction.  Hepple- 
stall  killed  might,  indeed,  encourage  the  others,  it  might 
array  the  manufacturers  solidly  under  Needham's  reac- 
tionary standard,  but  Barraclough  read  murder  as  going 
beyond  his  directions,  and  supposed  that  if  Reuben  were 
fired  on  and  missed  (as  he  would  be  by  an  amateur  marks- 
man), the  demonstration  of  unrest  at  Hepplestall's  would 
have  been  satisfyingly  made. 

He  was,  therefore,  sparing  in  his  tutorship  when  they 
had  come  into  his  room  and  handled  the  gun  together. 
"We  munna  call  the  whole  neighborhood  about  our  ears 
by  the  sound  of  a  shot,"  he  said. 

"No,"  said  John,  "but  if  tha'll  lend  me  this,  I'll  find  a 
plaice  for  practicing  up  on  moors." 

"Lend  thee  my  gun !  Nay,  lad,  tha's  asking  sumraat. 
It  wenna  do  to  carry  that  about  in  dayleight." 


114  HEPPLESTALL'S 


"I'll  tak'  it  to-neight,  and  bring  un  back  to-morrow 
neight." 

"To-neight?     Tha'  canna'  practice  in  the  dark." 

**Maybe  I'll  ha'  no  need  to  practice.  Maybe  there's 
justice  and  summat  greater  nor  me  to  guide  a  bullet  home. 
I  can  nobbut  try  and  I'm  bound  to  try  to-neight — the 
neight  o'  the  day  I  buried  her,  the  neight  when  I'm  hot. 
I'm  poor  spirited  and  I  know  it,  and  I'm  wrought  up  now. 
To-morrow  I'll  be  frit." 

Barraclough  balanced  the  gun  in  his  hands.  "I  had 
my  own  ideas  o'  this,"  he  said — the  idea  in  particular,  he 
might  have  added,  had  this  been  an  occasion  for  candor, 
that  such  precipitancy  was  contrary  to  the  best  interests 
of  an  informer.  Before  an  event  occurred,  a  sagacious 
spy  should  have  prophesied  it  and  here  was  this  ardent 
boy  in  so  desperate  a  hurry  for  action  that  Barraclough 
was  like  to  be  cheated  of  the  opportunity  of  proving  to 
Needham  that  he  was  dutifully  accessory  before  the  fact. 

But,  he  reflected,  he  had  not  found  Hepplestall's  a  fer- 
tile earth  for  his  seeds,  and  if  he  played  pranks  with  this 
present  opportunity,  if  he  attempted  delay  with  a  boy 
like  John,  a  temperamentalist  now  in  the  mood  to  murder, 
he  might  very  well  lose  his  onl}^  chance  of  justifying  him- 
self. Besides,  he  could  yet  figure  as  a  prophet  and  at  the 
same  time  establish  a  sound  alibi  for  himself  if  immedi- 
ately after  handing  the  gun  over  to  John,  he  set  off  to 
report  to  Needham.  On  the  whole,  he  saw  himself  accom- 
plishing the  object  of  his  mission  satisfactorily  enough. 

"Who's  gotten  the  better  right?"  John  was  saying. 
"Thou  that's  not  had  nobbut  a  month  o'  the  plaice,  or 
me  that  buried  a  wife  this  day  killed  by  Hepplestall?" 

Barraclough  bowed  his  head.  He  thought  it  politic  to 
hide  his  face  just  then,  and  the  motion  had  the  seeming  of 
a    reverent   assent.     "I've   no   reply   to    that,"    he    said. 


THE  SPY  115 

"Thy  claim  is  strongest.  Come  when  it's  dark,  and  tha* 
shall  have  the  gun." 

John  moved  to  the  door. 

"Where'st  going  now?"  asked  Barraclough,  apprehen- 
sive of  the  slackening  of  the  spring  he  had  wound  up. 

"To  her  grave,"  said  John,  and  Barraclough  nodded 
approvingly.  He  trusted  Annie's  grave;  there  would  be 
no  slackening  of  the  spring  and  mentally  he  thanked  John 
for  thinking  of  a  grave-side  vigil.  Barraclough  had  not 
thought  of  anything  so  trustworthy;  he  had  thought  of 
an  inn,  to  which  the  objections  were  that  he  had  no  wish 
to  be  seen  in  company  with  John,  and  that  alcohol  is 
capricious  in  effect. 

Barraclough  had  given  him  a  goal,  and  an  outlet  for 
all  his  pent-up  emotion.  There  was  his  dreadful  child- 
hood in  the  factory,  then  the  splendid  mitigation  whose 
name  was  Annie,  and  the  tearing  loss  of  her:  behind  all 
that,  there  was  the  System  and  above  it  now  was  Hepple- 
stall.  He  had  an  exaltation  by  her  grave.  There  was  a 
people  enslaved  by  Hepplestall  and  there  was  John  Brad- 
shaw,  their  deliverer,  John  Bradshaw  magnified  till  he  was 
qualified  for  the  high  role  of  an  avenging  angel.  He  was 
without  fear  of  himself  or  of  any  consequences,  he  had  no 
doubts  and  no  loose  ends,  he  had  simply  a  purpose — to  kill 
Hepplestall.  To  be  sane  is  to  think  and  John  did  not 
think :  he  felt. 

There  was  some  reason  why  he  could  not  kill  Hepple- 
stall till  it  was  dark.  Once  or  twice  he  tried,  vaguely,  to 
remember  what  the  reason  was,  then  forgot  that  he  was 
trying  to  remember  anything.  When  it  was  dark  he  was 
to  go  to  Barraclough's  for  the  gun  with  which  he  would 
kill  Hepplestall.  He  was  cold  and  hungry,  shivering 
violently  and  aware  of  nothing  but  that  he  was  God's 
executioner. 


116  HEPPLESTALL'S 

When  dusk  came  he  left  the  grave  and  went,  dry-lipped, 
stiimbling  like  a  man  walking  in  a  dream,  to  Barra- 
clough's.  At  the  sight  of  him,  Barraclough  had  more 
than  doubt.  Of  what  use  a  gun  in  these  palsied  hands? 
What  demonstration,  other  than  one  palpably  insane, 
could  this  trembling  instrument  effect? 

But  Bradshaw  was  the  one  hope  of  the  agent  and  since 
there  was  nothing  else  to  trust,  he  must  trust  his  luck. 

"The  gun !     The  gun !" 

Barraclough  placed  it  in  his  hands  without  a  word  and 
John  turned  with  it  and  was  gone.  The  canny  Barra- 
clough, taking  his  precautions  in  case  the  worst  (or  the 
best)  happened,  slept  that  night  in  a  public-house  midway 
between  Needham's  and  Hepplestall's.  He  had  made  him- 
self pleasant  to  several  passers-by  on  the  road;  he  had 
asked  them  the  time ;  he  had  established  his  alibi. 


CHAPTER  X 


Dorothy's  moment 


WHEN  Edward  came  home  on  the  daj  of  his  intro- 
duction to  the  factory,  Dorothy  met  him  with  an 
anxious,  "Well,  Edward?"  and,  "Oh,  Mother,"  he  had 
said,  "I  have  to  think  of  this.     Pray  do  not  ask  me  now." 

That  was  all  and,  if  she  liked,  she  could  consider  her- 
self snubbed  for  attempting  an  unwomanly  inquisitiveness 
into  the  affairs  of  men,  but  he  intended  bo  snub  nor  did 
she  interpret  him  as  side-tracking  her.  It  was,  simply, 
that  he  refused  to  involve  Dorothy  in  this  trouble. 

He  might  be  forced  to  take  some  desperate  measure — 
nothing  more  hopeful  than  his  first  thought  of  enlistment 
had  yet  occurred  to  him — and  if  things  were  to  come  to 
an  ugly  pass  like  that  he  wasn't  going  to  have  his  mother 
concerned  in  them.  He  declined  the  factory,  and  dis- 
cussion would  not  help. 

Reuben  felt  no  surprise  at  Edward's  silence.  The  boy 
was,  no  doubt,  considering  his  situation  and  would  come 
in  time  to  the  right  conclusions  about  it ;  he  would  see  that 
this  was  not  a  thing  to  be  settled  now,  but  one  which  had 
been  settled  twenty  years  ago  by  the  fact  that  Edward 
was  Reuben's  firstborn  son.  No :  he  was  not  anxious 
about  Edward,  with  his  jejune  opinions,  his  young  effer- 
vescence, his  failure,  from  the  polities  of  Oxford,  to  per- 
ceive that  life  was  earnest.      Edward  wanted,  did  he,  to 

play  at  being  a  lawyer:  so  had  Reuben  once  played  at 

117 


118  HEPPLESTALL'S 

being  a  Jacobite.  Youth  had  its  green  sickness.  But 
Dorothy  was  different:  he  couldn't  disembarrass  himself 
so  easily  about  Dorothy. 

They  were  all  putting  a  barrier  between  their  thoughts 
and  their  words,  but  marriage  had  not  blunted,  it  had  in- 
creased, his  sensitiveness  to  Dorothy's  moods,  and  he  was 
aware  tliat  she  was  troubled  now  more  deeply  than  he  had 
ever  known  her  moved  before.  She  seemed  to  him  to  be 
badly  missing  the  just  perspective,  to  be  making  a  moun- 
tain of  a  mole-hill,  to  be  making  tragedy  out  of  the  com- 
monplace comedy  of  ingenuous  youth,  to  be  too  much  the 
mother  and  too  little  the  wife,  to  be,  by  unique  excep- 
tion, unreasonable:  but  all  this  counted  for  nothing  with 
him  when  Dorothy  was  pained.  Yet  he  couldn't,  in  jus- 
tice, blame  Edward  as  first  cause  of  her  grief  when  the 
cause  was  not  Edward,  or  Edward's  youth,  but  the  uni- 
versal malady  of  youth.  He  reminded  himself  again  of 
that  fantastic  folly  of  his  own  youth,  Jacobitism,  and  it 
was  notably  forebearing  in  him  to  remember  it  now  and 
to  decide  that  his  own  green  sickness  had  been  less  excus- 
able than  Edward's. 

What  it  came  to  was  that  some  one  must  clear  the  air, 
some  one  must  break  this  painful  silence  they  were,  by 
common  consent,  keeping  about  the  subject  uppermost  in 
their  minds.  In  a  few  days  now  Edward  would  return  to 
Oxford  for  his  last  term  and  it  must  be  understood,  ex- 
plicitly, that  when  he  came  home  it  was  to  begin  his  ap- 
prenticeship at  the  factory.  Get  this  thing  finally  settled, 
get  it  definitely  stated  in  terms  on  both  sides,  and  Dorothy 
would  cease  to  make  a  grief  of  it.  It  was  the  inconclu- 
siveness,  he  thought,  which  perturbed  her. 

Edward  had  a  Greek  text  on  his  knee  when  Reuben  went 
into  the  drawing-room:  he  might  or  he  might  not  have 
been  reading  it.  He  might  have  been  conscious  that 
Dorothy  had  suddenly  got  up  and  thrown  the  curtains 


DOROTHY'S  MOMENT  119 

back  from  the  window  and  had  opened  it  and  stood  there 
now  as  if  she  needed  air.  Reuben  had  the  tact  to  make 
no  comment. 

He  sat  down.  Then  he  said,  "Edward,  I  have  been 
thinking  of  the  time  when  I  was  your  age  and  it  came  into 
my  mind  that  had  I  then  been  shown  a  factory  such  as 
I  showed  you  the  other  week,  I  should  have  thought  it  a 
very  atrocious  sight.  I  couldn't,  of  course,  actually  have 
been  shown  such  a  place  when  I  was  your  age,  for  there 
were  no  such  places.  Steam  was  in  its  infancy.  But  I 
put  the  matter  as  I  do  to  show  you  that  I  understand  the 
feelings  you  did  not  trouble  to  conceal." 

"Thank  you,  sir,"  said  Edward.  "I  have  to  acknowl- 
edge that  I  was  not  complimentary  to  your  achievement. 
I  was  not  thinking  of  it  as  an  achievement,  but  I,  too,  have 
been  thinking  and  I  see  how  cubbishly  I  failed  in  my  ap- 
preciation." 

"Come,"  said  Reuben,  "this  is  better." 

"As  far  as  it  goes,  sir,  yes.  But  I  am  not  to  go  much 
further.  In  the  shock  of  seeing  the  ugliness  of  that  place, 
I  believe  that  I  forgot  my  manners — more  than  my  man- 
ners. I  forgot  your  mastery  of  steam.  I  forgot  that 
having  turned  manufacturer,  you  became  a  great  manu- 
facturer. I — "  he  hesitated.  "I  am  not  trying  to  be 
handsome.     I  am  trying  to  be  just." 

"Just?" 

*'And,  believe  me,  trying  not  to  be  smug.  I  only  plead, 
sir,  that  I  am  old  enough  to  know  my  own  tastes." 

"Are  you.''  I  can  only  look  back  to  myself,  Edward, 
and  I  am  certain  that  when  I  was  your  age,  I  had  no  taste 
for  work." 

*'A  barrister's  is  a  busy  life,  sir.  That  is  what  I  seek 
to  persuade  you." 

*'And  I  grant  you  that  it  may  be.  I  will  grant  even 
that  you  may  have  a  taste  for  work,  and  work  of  a  legal 


120  HEPPLESTALL'S 

kind.  And  I  have  still  to  ask  you  if  you  think  it  right 
to  put  selfish  tastes  in  front  of  plain  duty." 

"Oh,  why  did  you  send  me  to  Oxford,  sir?  Why,  if 
you  destined  me  for  the  factory,  did  you  first  show  me 
the  pleasantness  of  the  world?" 

"I  wished  my  son  to  be  an  educated  gentleman.  You 
have  seen  Richard  Needham.  He  is  a  product,  extreme, 
but  still  a  product,  of  the  factories  and  nothing  but  the 
factories.  He  is,  as  I  told  you,  an  able  man.  But  he  is 
coarse.  He  is  a  manufacturer  who  has  no  thought  be- 
yond manufacturing.  That  is  why  I  sent  you  to  Oxford, 
where  you  went  knowing  that  you  were  heir  to  Hepple- 
stall's.  You  have  treated  this  subject  now  as  if  the  fac- 
tory was  a  surprise  that  I  have  sprung  upon  you." 

*'In  theory,  sir,  I  suppose  I  knew  what  you  expected 
of  me.  But  I  had  never  seen  the  factory  and  the  factory, 
in  practice,  after  Oxford,  after  some  education,  some 
glimpse  of  the  humanities,  is — " 

"I,  too,"  Reuben  warned  him,  "had  my  education." 

"Yes,"  said  Edward.  "Yes,"  and  looked  at  his  father 
with  something  like  awe.  It  was  true  that  Reuben  was 
educated — if  Edward  wanted  proof,  there  was  that  book- 
ishness  of  his  which  bordered  at  least  on  scholarliness — 
and  he  had  stomached  the  factory ;  he  had  stomached  it 
and  remained  a  gentleman !  He  impressed  Edward  by  his 
example:  he  had  had  the  cleverness,  in  this  conversation, 
to  suggest  that  Edward,  young,  was  in  the  same  case  as 
Reuben,  young,  had  been. 

As  a  fact,  their  cases  were  not  parallel  at  all.  Cir- 
cumstances such  as  Mr.  Bantison  had  pressed  Reuben  into 
manufacturing:  he  had  discovered,  almost  at  once,  his  en- 
thusiasm for  steam :  he  had  surrendered  himself  with  the 
imaginative  glamor  of  the  pioneer  and  if  the  road  was 
stony,  if  once  he  had  strayed  down  the  by-path  whose 
name  was  Phoebe,  he  had,  at  the  end  of  it,  Dorothv,  that 


DOROTHY'S  MOMENT  121 

bright  objective.  Edward  had  none  of  these.  Edward 
came  from  Oxford,  with  his  spruce  ambition  to  cut  a 
figure  at  the  bar,  and  was  confronted  with  the  menacing 
immensity  of  the  great  factory,  full-grown  in  naked 
ugliness.  He  was  without  motive,  other  than  the  com- 
mands of  his  father,  to  do  outrage  on  his  prejudices. 

But  it  was  not  for  Reuben  to  point  out  these  differences, 
nor,  it  seemed,  for  Dorothy  to  intervene  with  word  of  such 
of  them  as  she  perceived.  She  was  all  with  Edward  in 
this  struggle,  but  she  was  loyal  to  Reuben  and  he  did  her 
grave  injustice  if  he  thought  she  had  made  alliance  with 
her  son  against  her  husband.  She  had  kept  silence  and 
she  meant  to  keep  silent  to  the  end — if  she  could,  if,  that 
is,  Reuben  did  not  drive  too  hard :  and  she  had  to  acknowl- 
edge that,  so  far,  he  had  not  used  the  whip.  As  for  her 
private  sufferings,  she  hoped  she  had  the  courage  to  keep 
them  private.     That  was  the  badge  of  women. 

"Then  I  can  only  admire,'*  Edward  was  saying.  "I 
can  only  give  you  best.  I  can  only  say  you  are  a  stronger 
man  than  I." 

Reuben  thought  so  too,  but  "Pooh,"  he  said,  "an  older 
man." 

"But  you  were  young  when  you  took  up  manufacturing. 
I — I  cannot  take  it  up.  Let  me  be  candid,  sir.  I  abhor 
the  factory." 

"We  spoke  just  now  of  tastes.  Will  it  help  you  to 
think  of  the  factory  as  an  acquired  taste.''  You  are  asked 
to  make  a  trial  of  it  and  it  is  not  usual  to  refuse  things 
that  are  known  to  be  acquired  tastes — olives,  for  example 
— without  making  fair  trial  of  them." 

"No,"  said  Edward,  meeting  his  father's  eye.  "But  it 
is  usual  to  eat  olives.  It  is  not  usual  for  a  gentleman  to 
turn  manufacturer." 

"Edward !"  Dorothy  broke  silence  there. 

"Oh!"  said  Reuben,  "this  is  natural.     Our  limb  of  the 


122  HEPPLESTALL'S 

law  has  ambitions.  Already  he  is  fancying  himself  a 
judge — my  judge." 

"I  apologize,  sir,"  said  Edward.  "I  acknowledge,  I 
have  never  doubted,  that  you  are  both  manufacturer  and 
gentleman.  But  I  cannot  hope  to  repeat  that  miracle 
myself." 

"You  can  try." 

"I  have  the  law  very  obstinately  in  my  mind,  sir.  I 
could,  as  you  say,  try  to  become  a  manufacturer.  One 
can  try  to  do  anything,  even  things  that  are  contrary  to 
one's  inclinations  and  beyond  one's  strength." 

*'I  will  lend  you  strength." 

"You  could  do  that  and  I  am  the  last  to  deny  you  have 
abundance  of  strength.  But  I  believe  in  spite  of  your 
aid  that  I  should  fail,  and  the  failure  would  not  be  a 
single  but  a  double  one.  After  failing  here  as  manufac- 
turer, I  could  hardly  hope  to  succeed  elsewhere  as  a  bar- 
rister. I  should  have  wasted  my  most  valuable  years  in 
demonstrating  to  you  what  I  know  for  myself  without 
any  necessity  of  trial,  that  I  am  unfitted  for  trade." 

"You  believe  yourself  above  it.  That  is  the  truth, 
Edward." 

It  was  the  truth.  Reuben  had  stooped  and  Edward 
did  not  intend  to  perpetuate  the  stoop.  Edward  was  a 
wronged  man  cheated  of  his  due,  robbed  by  the  unintelli- 
gible apostasy  of  his  father  of  his  birthright  of  land 
ownership  and  if  the  attitude  and  the  language  with  which 
he  now  confronted  Reuben  were  unfilially  independent, 
they  were,  at  least,  reticent  and  considerate  expressions  of 
what  he  actually  thought.  Reuben  imagined  him  youth- 
fully extravagant:  he  was,  on  the  contrary,  a  model  of 
self-restraint,  he  was  a  dam  unbreakable,  withstanding  an 
urgent  flood.  The  indictment  he  could  fling  at  his  father ! 
The  resentments  he  could  voice !     And,  instead,  he  was  do- 


DOROTHY'S  MOMENT  123 

ing  no  more  than  refusing  to  go  into  a  disreputable  fac- 
tory.     Above  it?      He   should   think   he   was    above   it. 

"I  used  the  word  'unfitted,'"  he  said.  "Shall  we  let 
that  stand?" 

"Till  you  disprove  it,  it  may  stand.  When  you  come 
down  from  Oxford,  you  will  go  into  the  factory  and  dis- 
prove it.'* 

"No." 

"I  have  been  very  patient,  Edward.  I  have  let  you  talk 
yourself  out,  but — '* 

"Lord,  sir,  the  things  I  haven't  said !" 

"Indeed?     Do  you  wish  to  say  them?" 

Edward  did,  but  he  glanced  at  his  mother,  whose  one 
contribution  to  their  discussion  had  been  a  reproof  of 
him,  of  him,  who  had  been  so  splendidly  restrained !  Why, 
then,  should  he  spare  her?  Why,  if  she  had  deserted  to 
the  other  side,  should  he  not  roll  out  his  whole  impeach- 
ment? Why  not,  even  though  it  implicated  her,  even 
though  he  must  suggest  that  she  was  accessory  to  the 
weaving  of  the  web  in  which  he  struggled?  He  thought 
she  was,  because  of  that  one  sharp  cry,  on  Reuben's  side 
in  this. 

She  read  that  thought.  She  saw  how  wildly  he  who 
should  have  known  better  was  misunderstanding  her,  and 
it  added  to  a  suffering  she  had  not  thought  possible  to  in- 
crease. Was  this  her  moment,  then?  Sooner  or  later, 
she  must  intervene,  she  must  throw  in  her  weight  for  Ed- 
ward at  whatever  strain  upon  her  loyalty  to  Reuben,  but 
it  must  be  at  the  right  moment  and  probably  that  moment 
would  not  come  yet,  when  Edward  was  present  to  con- 
fuse her  by  his  indiscretions,  but  later,  when  she  was  alone 
with  Reuben.  It  was  enormously,  it  was  vitally  impor- 
tant that  she  should  choose  her  moment  well.  If  she  spoke 
now,  she  would  of  course  correct  the  mistake  that  Edward 


124  HEPPLESTALL'S 

was  so  cruelly  making  about  her,  but  that  was  not  to  the 
main  point.  She  would  not,  if  she  could  help  it,  speak  till 
she  was  sure  that  the  favorable  moment  had  arrived.  All 
else  was  to  be  subordinate  to  that. 

Reuben  followed  Edward's  glance.  "Yes,"  he  said, 
"you  are  distressing  your  mother,"  and,  certainly,  she 
felt  her  moment  was  escaping  her.  If  she  spoke  now  she 
must  say,  "No,  Reuben.  You,  not  Edward,  are  the  cause 
of  my  distress,"  and  she  could  not  say  that.  She  could 
only  wait,  feeling  that  to  wait  was  to  risk  her  moment's 
never  coming  at  all. 

"I  see  we  are  distressing  her,"  said  Edward,  studiously 
abstaining  from  putting  emphasis  upon  the  "we."  "And 
the  many  more  things  that  I  might  say  shall  not  be  said. 
I  will  take  a  short  cut  to  the  end.  The  end  is  my  absolute 
refusal  to  go  into  the  factory  upon  any  terms  whatever." 

Reuben  rose,  with  clenched  fists.  He  had  not  the  in- 
tention of  striking  his  son,  but  the  impulse  was  irresistible 
to  dominate  the  slighter  man,  to  stand  menacingly  over 
him.  How  in  this  should  she  find  her  moment?  Where  if 
temper  rose,  if  Reuben  did  the  unforgivable,  if  he  struck 
Edward,  where  was  her  opportunity  to  make  a  peace  and 
gain  her  point?  As  she  had  cried  "Edward!",  so  now, 
*'Reuben !"  she  cried,  and  put  a  hand  on  his. 

He  responded  instantly  to  the  sound  of  her  voice  and 
the  touch  of  her  hand.  "You  are  right,  Dorothy,"  he 
said.  "We  must  not  flatter  our  young  comedian  by  tak- 
ing him  gravely.'* 

"That  is  an  insult,  sir,"  said  Edward. 

"In  comedy,"  Reuben  smiled  suavely  at  him,  "it  may  be 
within  the  rules  for  a  father  to  insult  a  vaporing  son.  In 
life,  such  possibilities  do  not  exist." 

Ridicule !  Edward  could  fight  against  any  weapon  but 
this.  "You  treat  me  like  a  child,"  he  said  in  plaintive  im- 
potence. 


DOROTHY'S  MOMENT  125 

"Oh,  no,"  said  Reuben.     "So  far,  I  have  given  you  the 
benefit  of  the  doubt.     I  have  not  whipped  you  yet." 

"Whipped !" 

"A  method  of  correction,  Edward,  used  upon  children 
and  sometimes  on  those  whose  years  outstrip  their  sense." 

"Do  you  seriously  picture  me,  sir,  remaining  here  to  be 
a  whipping  block?" 

"Children  run  away :  and  children  are  brought  back." 

Her  moment!  Oh,  it  was  slipping  from  her  as  they 
squabbled,  Edward's  future  was  at  stake,  and  not  his 
alone.  If  young  Tom  Hepplestall  was  for  the  army,  there 
were  still  her  younger  sons ;  there  were  Edward's  own  un- 
born sons.  The  stake  was  not  Edward's  future  only,  it 
was  the  future  of  the  Hepplestalls  and  all  her  landed  in- 
stincts were  in  revolt  against  the  thought  that  her  sons 
were  to  follow  Reuben  in  his  excursion,  his  strange  varia- 
tion, from  the  type  she  knew.  Once  his  factory  had 
seemed  mysterious  and  romantic.  Now,  she  was  facing 
it,  she  was  seeing  it  through  Edward's  outraged  eyes. 
Incredible  mercy  that  she  had  not  seen  it  before,  but  not 
incredible  in  the  light  of  her  love  for  Reuben.  It  had  been 
a  thing  apart  from  her  life  and  now,  implacably,  was  come 
into  it.  There  was  no  CA'ading  the  factory  now ;  there  was 
no  facile  blinking  at  it  as  a  dark  place  in  Reuben's  life 
about  which  she  could  be  incurious,  it  was  claiming  her 
Edward,  it  had  come,  through  hira,  into  her  life  now. 

It  was  crouching  for  her,  like  a  beast  in  the  jungle  and 
what  was  to  happen  when  the  beast  sprang,  to  her,  to 
Reuben,  to  their  love?  She  had  held  aloof  from  the  fac- 
tory and  she  had  kept  Reuben's  love.  Were  these  cause 
and  effect  and  was  her  aloofness  a  condition  of  his  love? 
Was  her  hold  on  him  the  hold  of  one  consenting  to  be  a 
decoration,  and  no  more  than  a  decoration  in  his  life? 
Had  she  shied  from  facts  all  these  years,  and  was  retribu- 
tion at  hand? 


126  HEPPLESTALL'S 

These  were  desperate  questionings,  but  Edward  was 
her  son  and  she  must  take  her  risks  for  him,  even  this 
risk  imperiling-  her  all,  this  so  much  greater  risk  than  the 
life  she  risked  for  him  when  he  was  bom.  But  when  to 
speak?  When  to  put  all  to  the  test?  Surely  not  just 
now  when  this  pair  of  men,  one  calling  the  other  "child," 
both,  one  as  bully,  the  other  as  Gasconader,  were  behav- 
ing like  children.     She  groped  helplessly  for  her  moment. 

Then,  suddenly,  as  she  seemed  to  dro^vn  in  deep  water 
and  to  clutch  feebly  upwards,  she  knew  that  her  moment 
was  come.  She  had  not  heard  the  sound  of  the  shot  com- 
ing from  the  shrubbery  and  felt  no  pain.  She  only  knew 
that  she  was  weak,  that  her  moment,  safely,  surely,  was 
come,  and  that  she  must  use  it  quickly. 

Because  she  was  lying  on  the  floor  and  Reuben  and 
Edward  were  bending  over  her,  she  was  looking  up  into 
their  faces.  That  seemed  strange  to  her,  but  everything 
was  strange  because  everything  was  right.  In  this  mo- 
ment, there  was  nothing  jeopardous;  she  had  only  to 
speak,  indeed  she  need  not  actually  trouble  to  put  her 
message  into  words,  and  Reuben  would  infallibly  agree 
with  her.  There  were  no  difficulties,  after  all.  She  had 
felt  that  it  was  only  a  question  of  the  right  moment,  and 
here  was  her  moment,  exquisitely,  miraculously,  compel- 
lingly  right. 

Her  hand  seemed  very  heavy  to  lift  but,  somehow,  she 
lifted  it,  somehow  she  was  holding  Reuben's  hand  and  Ed- 
ward's, somehow  she  was  joining  them  in  friendship  and 
forgiveness.  It  was  right,  it  was  right  beyond  all  doubt. 
Reuben  would  never  coerce  Edward  now,  and  she  smiled 
happily  up  at  them. 

"Reuben,"  she  said,  then  *'Edward,"  that  was  all.  Her 
hand  fell  to  the  floor. 

Edward  looked  up  from  Dorothy's  dead  face  to  see  bis 
father  disappearing  through  the  window,  but  Reuben  need 


DOROTHY'S  MOMENT  12T 

not  have  hurried.  John  Bradshaw  was  standing  in  the 
shrubbery  twenty  yards  from  the  window,  making  no 
effort  to  run.  There  was  no  effort  left  in  liim.  He  was 
the  spring  wound  up  by  Mr.  Barraclough;  now  he  had 
acted  and  he  was  relaxed;  he  was  relaxed  and  happy.  A 
life  for  a  life,  and  such  a  life — Hepplestall's !  He  had 
led  his  people  out  of  slavery.     He  had  shot  Hepplestall. 

And  in  the  light  from  the  window,  he  saw  rushing  at 
him  the  man  who  was  dead.  There  was  no  Annie  now  to 
laugh  his  superstitious  fears  away  and  to  fold  him  in  her 
protective  arms:  there  was  no  one  to  tell  him  that  the 
silent  figure  was  not  Hepplestall's  ghost.  He  believed 
utterly  that  a  "boggart"  was  leaping  at  him. 

True,  there  was  a  leap,  and  a  blow  delivered  straight 
at  his  jaw  with  all  the  force  of  Reuben's  passionate  grief 
behind  it,  and  the  blow  met  empty  air.  John,  felled  by  a 
mightier  force  than  Reuben's,  felled  by  his  ghostly  fear, 
lay  crumpled  on  the  ground  and  Hepplestall,  recovering 
balance,  flung  him  over  his  shoulder  like  a  sack  and  was 
carrying  him  into  the  house  before  the  servants,  alarmed 
by  the  shot,  had  reached  the  room. 

Edward  met  him.  "I  am  riding  for  the  doctor,  sir,'^ 
he  said. 

*'Doctor?"  said  Reuben.  "It's  not  a  doctor  that  is 
needed  now,  it's  a  hangman.  Lock  that  in  the  cellar," 
he  said  to  the  servants,  dropping  his  sprawling  burden  on 
the  floor,  *'and  go  for  the  constables."  Then,  when  they 
were  gone,  when  he  had  silenced  by  one  look  their  cries  of 
horror  and  they  had  slunk  out  of  the  door  as  if  they  and 
not  the  senseless  boy  they  carried  were  the  murderers, 
*'Leave  me,  Edward,  leave  me,"  he  said. 

Edward  stretched  out  his  hand.  There  was  sympathy 
in  his  gesture  and  there  was,  too,  a  claim  to  a  share  in 
the  sorrow  that  had  come  to  them.  Dorothy  was  Ed- 
ward's mother. 


128  HEPPLESTALL'S 

"Go,"  said  Reuben  fiercely;  and  Edward  left  him  with 
his  dead. 

The  beast  had  made  his  spring.  Dorothy  had  not  gone 
to  the  factory,  and  the  factory  had  come  to  her. 


CHAPTER  XI 

THE  HATE  OF  THE  HEPPLESTALLS 

PHOEBE  made  all  reasonable,  and  a  few  indulgent,  al- 
lowances for  the  weaknesses  of  manflesh,  but  when 
she  awoke  to  the  knowledge  that  John  had  not  been  home 
all  night,  she  was  downright  angry  with  him.  A  bereaved 
husband  might  accept  the  consolation  offered  by  his 
friends  on  the  day  of  his  wife's  funeral,  and  might  go  on 
accepting  it  late  into  the  night.  She  had  left  the  door 
on  the  latch  for  him  with  the  thought  that  it  wasn't  like 
John  to  drown  his  sorrow,  but  men  were  men,  even  the  best 
of  them,  and  she  had  put  a  lot  of  housework  behind  her 
that  day.  He  would  have  been  constantly  getting  in  her 
way  with  his  clumsy  efforts  to  help,  and  if  he  had  found 
forgetfulness,  no  matter  how,  they  had  both  of  them  come 
through  the  day  very  well. 

But  he  had  not  come  home  at  all ;  he  had  forgotten  too 
thoroughly,  and  Phoebe  intended  to  give  liim  "the  rough 
side  of  her  tongue"  the  moment  she  came  across  him  in 
the  factory.  It  never  occurred  to  her  that  he  would  not 
be  in  the  factory.  To  be  out  all  night  was  a  departure 
from  his  custom,  and  on  such  a  night  a  departure  from 
decency,  but  to  be  absent  from  work  was  more  than  either 
of  these;  it  was  defiance  of  necessity,  a  treachery  to  her 
and  to  his  children  and  she  knew  her  John  better  than  to 
suspect  him  of  conduct  like  that.  He  might  be  grief- 
stricken  and,  after  that  (homeopathically),  ale-stricken, 

129 


130  HEPPLESTALL'S 

but  the  law  of  nature  was  "Work  or  Clem,'*  and  John 
would  be  at  work. 

He  was  not  at  work,  and  that  was  not  the  only  thing 
to  be  remarked  that  morning.  Nobody  appeared  to  have 
a  word  for  her,  though  there  was  an  exceptional  disposi- 
tion to  gossip.  Even  the  overseers  had  caught  the  infec- 
tion and  formed  gossiping  groups  to  the  detriment  of  disci- 
pline. She  was  too  preoccupied  at  first  to  notice  that 
she  was  their  cynosure  or  to  wonder  what  it  meant,  but 
she  couldn't  for  long  be  unconscious  of  their  gaze. 

They  were  looking  at  her,  every  one  was  looking  at  her, 
and  her  first  impulse  was  to  be  angry  with  them  for  star- 
ing so  curiously  and  her  second  was  to  conceal  her  aware- 
ness of  their  gaze.  They  stared?  Let  them  stare.  She 
had  not  been  at  the  factory  on  the  previous  day,  but  she 
had  had  leave  of  absence.  She  had  been  burying  her 
daughter-in-law,  and  if  they  wanted  to  stare  at  her  for 
that,  they  could  stare.  And  then  she  connected  their 
fixed  regard  with  John's  absence.  There  was  something 
serious  then?  Something  about  John  of  which  they  knew 
and  she  did  not?  She  dropped  abruptly  her  pretense  of 
unconsciousness. 

"For  God's  sake  tell  me  what's  to  do,"  she  cried.  "If 
it's  John,  I'm  his  mother  and  I've  the  right  to  know.'* 

Will  Aspinall,  the  overseer,  detached  himself  from  his 
group.  "Get  at  work,"  he  bawled  at  large,  then  with  a 
rare  gentleness,  led  Phoebe  aside.  "Either  tha's  gottea 
th'  brassiest  f aice  i'  Lankysheer,  or  else  tha'  doan't  kna'," 
he  said. 

"Is  it  to  do  with  John?"  she  asked. 

"Aye,"  he  said,  "it's  all  to  do  wi'  thy  John." 

"I  know  nothing  beyond  that  he's  not  been  home  all 
night." 

"A  kna'  he's  not  bin  hoam.  He's  done  wi'  coming 
hoam." 


THE  HATE  OF  THE  HEPPLESTALLS     131 

"Why?     Why?     ^Vllat  has  happened?" 

**A'm  striving  to  tell  thee  that.  Th'  job's  not  easy, 
though."     He  looked  at  her.     "Wilt  have  it  straight?" 

"I'm  never  afraid  of  truth." 

"Truth  can  hit  hard.  Well,  I'll  teU  thee.  Thy  John 
shot  at  th'  maister's  wife  last  neight  an'  hit  her.  They've 
gotten  him."  He  upturned  a  waste-bin.  "Now,  A'm  real 
sorry  for  thee  and  it  weren't  a  pleasant  job  for  me  to 
break  th'  news.  That's  over,  though,  and  tha'  knaws  now. 
Next  sit  thee  down  on  this.  It's  in  a  corner,  like,  and 
folks  canna  watch  thee.  When  tha'  feels  like  work,  come 
and  tell  me."  He  left  her  with  rough  kindliness,  and  re- 
lieved his  feelings  by  cuffing  a  child  who  was  peering  round 
a  loom  at  them.  He  was  paid  to  be  brutal,  and  the  child, 
gathering  himself  up  from  the  floor,  might  have  thought 
that  the  overseer  was  earning  his  wages:  but  the  shrewd 
blow  was  rather  a  warning  to  the  rest  and  an  expression 
of  his  sympathy  with  Phoebe  than  an  episode  in  his  day's 
work. 

That  Aspinall,  and  not  he  alone  but  the  general  sense 
of  the  workers,  should  be  sympathetic  towards  her  was  in 
its  way  remarkable  enough.  They  expected  naturally 
that  John  would  hang,  but  they  had  definitely  the  idea 
that  retribution  for  his  deed  would  not  stop  at  the  capital 
punishment  of  the  actual  malefactor.  Hepplestall  would 
"tak'  it  out  of  all  on  us,"  and  "We'll  go  ravenous  for 
this,"  "Skin  an'  sorrow — that's  our  shape,"  and  (from  a 
humorist)  "Famished?  He'll  spokcshave  us"  were  some 
of  the  phrases  by  which  they  expressed  their  belief  in  the 
widespread  severity  of  Hepplestall's  vengeance. 

Yet  they  had  no  bitterness  against  John,  nor  against 
Phoebe  who,  as  his  mother,  might  be  supposed  to  have  a 
special  responsibility.  It  was  a  dreadful  deed  and  the 
more  dreadful  since  his  bullet  had  miscarried  and  had 
killed  a  woman;  but   it  had   fanned   to   quick   fire    their 


132  HEPPLESTALL'S 

smoldering  hatred  of  Hepplestall  and  there  was  more  re- 
joicing than  regret  that  he  was,  through  Dorothy,  cast 
down.  They  would  have  preferred  to  knqw  that  John 
had  hit  the  true  target  but,  as  it  was,  it  was  well  enough 
and  they  were  not  going  to  squeal  at  the  price  they  ex- 
pected to  pay.  Their  commiseration  was  not  for  the  be- 
reaved master,  but  for  the  about-to-be-bereaved  mother  of 
the  murderer. 

Somebody  moved  a  candle  so  that  Phoebe  in  her  corner 
should  be  the  more  effectually  screened  from  observation. 
It  was  a  kindly  act,  but  one  which  she  hardly  needed. 
Her  thoughts  were  with  John,  but  not  with  a  John  who 
was  going  to  be  hanged;  they  were  with  a  John  who  was 
going  to  be  saved. 

Murderers  were  hanged  and  so  for  the  matter  of  that 
were  people  convicted  of  far  less  heinous  crimes.  That 
was  the  law,  but  she  had  never  a  doubt  but  that  Hepple- 
«tall  was  above  the  law,  that  he  was  the  law,  and  that 
John's  fate  was  not  with  a.i\  impersonal  entity  called  jus- 
tice but,  simply,  with  Hepplestall.  Probably  two-thirds 
of  her  fellow-workers  were  firmly  of  the  same  belief  in  his 
omnipotence,  though  they  hadn't,  as  she  supposed  she 
had,  grounds  for  thinking  that  he  would  intervene  on 
John's  behalf. 

When  Annie  died  she  had  told  herself  vehemently  that 
she  would  never  go,  a  suppliant,  to  Hepplestall,  she  would 
never  let  him  share  in  John's  children  who  were  his  grand- 
children ;  but  that  resolution  was  rescinded  now.  Reuben 
had  never  hinted  since  the  day  when  Peter  and  Phoebe 
went  to  him,  aghast  at  the  edict  which  broke  Peter's  fac- 
tory, that  he  remembered  he  had  had  a  son  by  Phoebe.  It 
was  so  long  ago  and  perhaps  he  had  indeed  forgotten,  but 
she  must  go  to  him  and  remind  him  now.  She  must  tell 
him  that  John  Bradshaw  was  his  son.  He  could  not  hang 
his  son. 


THE  HATE  OF  THE  HEPPLESTALLS     133 

Daylight  was  penetrating  through  the  sedulously 
cleaned  windows  of  the  factory.  It  was  the  hour  when  ex- 
pensive artificial  light  could  be  dispensed  with  and  candles 
were  being  extinguished;  it  was  the  hour,  too,  when 
Reuben  might  ordinarily  be  expected  in  his  office.  He  had 
the  usual  manufacturers'  habit  of  riding  or  walking  to 
the  factory  for  half  an  hour  before  breakfast,  and  to-day 
word  was  passed  through  the  rooms  that  he  had,  surpris- 
ingly, arrived  as  usual. 

The  word  had  not  reached  Phoebe,  but  she  expected 
notliing  else.  She  had  to  speak  with  Reuben,  and  there- 
fore he  would  be  there.  She  came  from  her  corner  and 
told  Aspinall  what  she  intended. 

*'Nay,  nay !"  he  said. 

"Please  open  the  door  for  me." 

"A  canna',"  he  said.  "Coom,  missus,  what  art  think- 
ing?    He'll  spit  at  thee." 

"I  have  to  speak  to  him  about  John,"  said  Phoebe. 
"Open  the  door  and  let  me  through." 

"It's  more  nor  my  plaice  is  worth,"  he  said,  but,  never- 
theless, he  was  weakening.  She  was  not  making  a  request, 
she  was  not  a  weaver  asking  a  favor  of  an  overseer,  she 
was  Phoebe  Bradshaw,  whom  Peter  had  brought  up  to  be 
a  lady,  giving  an  order  to  a  workman  in  the  tone  of  one 
who  commands  obedience  as  a  habit. 

He  scratched  his  head  in  doubt,  then  turned  to  a  fellow- 
overseer  and  consulted  with  him.  They  murmured  to- 
gether with  a  wealth  of  puzzlement  and  headshaking  and, 
presently,  "Now,  Mrs.  Bradshaw,"  said  Aspinall,  "tak* 
heed  to  me.  Yon  door's  fast,  but  me  an'  Joe  here  are 
goin'  to  open  it  on  factory  business,  understand.  If  hap- 
pen tha's  creeping  up  behind  us,  it's  none  likely  we'll  see 
thee  coomin'  and  if  tha'  slips  through  door  and  into  office 
while  we've  gotten  door  open  on  our  business,  it's  because 
tha'  was  too  spry  for  us  to  stop  thee.     That's  best  we 


134  HEPPLESTALL'S 

can    do    for    thee    and   it's    takkin*   big   risks    an'    all." 

"I'm  grateful,"  said  Phoebe. 

They  opened  the  door  and  made  loud  sounds  of  protest 
as  she  slipped  through,  causing  Reuben  to  look  up  from 
the  bureau  where  he  was  opening  his  letters  and  to  see 
both  Phoebe  standing  in  his  office  and  the  actors  at  the 
door.  He  waved  them  off  and,  when  the  door  was  closed, 
"Well?"  he  said. 

"Reuben !"  said  Phoebe. 

He  rose  with  an  angry  cry.  How  dared  she,  this 
weaver,  this  roughened,  withered  old  woman,  address  him 
by  his  Christian  name?  This  gray  wraith,  whose  hair 
hung  mustily  about  her  like  the  jacket  of  lichen  about  a 
ruined  tree,  she  to  call  him  by  the  name  his  Dorothy  alone 
had  used !  That  morning  of  all  mornings  it  was  outrage 
of  outrages. 

He  did  not  know  her  whom  once  he  nearly  loved. 
Twenty  years  ago  he  had  put  her  from  him  and  had  ex- 
cluded her  from  his  recollection.  Long  ago  the  factory 
had  outgrown  the  stage  when  an  employer  has  knowledge 
of  his  workpeople  as  individuals ;  he  did  not  know  her  nor 
had  the  identification  of  the  prisoner  as  John  Bradshaw, 
a  spinner  in  the  factory,  conveyed  any  personal  signifi- 
cance to  him.  Bradshaw  was  a  common  name,  and  he  had 
never  known  that  Phoebe  had  called  their  son  Jolin. 

"But  I  am  Phoebe,"  she  said,  standing  her  ground  be- 
fore his  menacing  advance.  **Phoebe,  Reuben.  Phoebe, 
who — Phoebe  Bradshaw." 

He  remembered  now,  he  had  remembered  at  the  second 
*'Phoebe" — and  at  the  second  "Reuben."  He  was  even 
granting  her,  grimly,  her  right  to  call  him  by  that  name 
when  the  "Bradshaw"  struck  upon  his  ear. 

"Bradshaw?"  he  repeated.  "Bradshaw?"  And  this 
second  time,  there  was  an  angry  question  in  it. 

**I  came  about   John,"   she   said.     "John   is   our   son, 


THE  HATE  OF  THE  HEPPLESTALLS     135 

Reuben.  Of  course  he  did  not  know,  but — '*  Reuben  had 
covered  the  space  between  them  at  a  bound.  He  was 
holding  her  hands  tightly,  he  was  looking  at  her  with  eyes 
that  seared.  In  moments  like  these,  thought  outspaces 
time.  John,  his  wife's  murderer,  was  his  son,  and  the  son 
of  Phoebe  Bradshaw  whom  he  had — well,  he  supposed  he 
had  betrayed  her.  She  had  told  the  son,  of  course.  He 
had  nursed  a  grievance,  he  had  shot  Dorothy  in  revenge. 
Whether  he  had  aimed  at  Reuben  and  hit  Dorothy,  or 
whether  he  lied  when  he  had  made  that  statement  to  the 
constable  and  had,  in  fact,  aimed  at  Dorothy,  they  had  the 
true  motive  now.  Reuben  might  have  put  it  that  his  sin 
had  found  him  out,  but  his  thought  did  not  run  on  those 
lines.  Then,  what  was  she  saying?  "Of  course,  he  did 
not  know."  Oh,  that  was  absurd,  that  took  them  back 
for  motive  to  what  John  had  been  telling  the  constable — 
that  he  shot  at  Hepplestall  to — to — (what  was  the  boy's 
wind-bagging  phrase  which  the  constable  reported?) — "to 
set  the  people  free  from  a  tyrant." 

"Say  that  again,"  he  said. 

She  met  his  eye  fearlessly.  "Of  course  he  did  not  know. 
You  could  not  think  that  I  would  tell  of  my  shame. 
Father  and  I,  we  invented  a  second  cousin  Bradshaw  whom 
I  married,  who  died  before  John  was  born." 

Yes,  she  was  speaking  the  truth,  and,  after  all,  he  didn't 
know  that  it  mattered  very  much.  Dorothy  was  dead, 
eitlier  way,  but,  yes,  it  did  matter.  It  mattered  enor- 
mously, because  of  Dorothy's  sons.  If  John  had  known, 
there  must  have  been  disclosures  at  the  trial,  things  said 
against  Reuben,  ordinary  enough  but  not  the  things  he 
cared  to  have  Dorothy's  sons  know  about  their  father. 

It  wasn't  criminal  to  have  seduced  a  woman  twenty 
years  ago,  and  the  exceptional  thing  about  Reuben  was 
that  he  had  seduced  no  more  women,  that  he  had  not 
abused  his  position  as  employer.     Needham  was  known. 


136  HEPPLESTALL'S 

with  grim  humor,  as  "the  father  of  his  people."     Whereas 
Reuben  had  been  Dorothy's  husband. 

He  saw  the  trial  and  that  disclosure  insulting  to 
Dorothy's  memory.  He  heard  the  jeers  of  Needham  and 
his  kind.  Hepplestall,  Gentleman  Hepplestall,  reduced 
by  public  ordeal  to  a  common  brutishness  with  the  coarse 
libertines  he  had  despised !  He  saw  Dorothy's  sons  con- 
temptuous of  their  father.  This,  they  would  take  oc- 
casion to  think,  was  where  factory-owning  led  a  man. 

*'You're  sure  of  this?"  he  asked.  **You're  absolutely 
sure  he  did  not  know  he  is  my  son?" 

*' Absolutely,"  she  said. 

"Ah,"  he  said,  "that's  good.  If  he  had  known,  I  be- 
lieve I  must  have  taken  measures  to  defeat  justice.  I 
should  have  done  all  in  my  power  to  have  spirited  him 
away  before  the  trial,  and  I  believe  I  should  have  con- 
trived it.  I  feel  quite  keenly  enough  about  the  matter  to 
have  done  that."  Which  was,  to  Phoebe,  confirmation  of 
her  belief  in  his  omnipotence.  "But,  as  it  is,"  he  went  on, 
*'as  it  is,  thank  God,  the  law  can  take  its  course."  He 
was  back  in  his  chair  now,  looking  at  her  with  a  relief 
that  was  almost  a  smile,  if  tigerish.  She,  he  was  think- 
ing, might  still  speak  to  his  discomfiture  if  she  were  put  in 
the  box  at  the  trial,  but  he  would  see  that  she  was  not 
called.  There  was  no  need  to  call  her  to  establish  John's 
absence  from  home  that  night,  when  he  had  been  caught 
red-handed.  They  could  do  without  Phoebe,  and  he  would 
take  care  they  should. 

*'Can  take  its  course,"  she  repeated,  bewildered.  What 
had  Reuben  meant  if  not,  incredibly,  that  had  she  told 
John  of  her  "shame,"  he  would  have  been  saved  now,  but 
that,  as  it  was,  John  must —  "But  it  cannot  tak'  its 
course,  John  is  your  son.  Your  son.  Reuben,  he's  your 
son.     You  cannot  hang  your  son." 

"He  killed  my  wife." 


THE  HATE  OF  THE  HEPPLESTALLS     137 

**But  you  haven't  understood.  They  haven't  told  you. 
John  was  not  himself.     He — " 

"Drunk?" 

"No,  no.  Oh,  Reuben.  He  was  crazed  with  grief  on 
account  of  his  wife.  Don't  they  tell  you  when  the  likes 
of  that  chances  in  the  factory?  Annie  Bradshaw,  that 
was  John's  wife  and  your  daughter-in-law — she  bore  a 
child  on  the  floor  in  there  and  died.  You  must  have 
heard  of  it." 

Reuben  nodded.  "These  women,"  he  said,  "are  always 
cutting  it  too  fine."  His  gesture  disclaimed  responsi- 
bility for  the  reckless  greed  of  women. 

"Yes,"  she  said,  brazenly  agreeing  with  his  monstrous 
imputation,  "but  John  loved  Annie  and  he's  been  in  a 
frenzy  since  she  died  and  in  his  mazed  brain  we  can  see 
how  it  seemed  to  him.  We  can,  can't  we,  Reuben?  She 
died  in  the  factory  and  it  looked  to  him  that  the  factory 
had  killed  her.  And  then  he  must  have  got  a  gun.  I 
don't  know  how,  but  we  can  see  the  crazy  lad  with  a  gun 
in  his  hands  and  the  wild  thought  in  his  mind  that  the 
factory  killed  Annie.  It's  your  factory,  it's  Hepple- 
stall's,  and  it  'ud  seem  to  him  that  Hepplestall  killed 
Annie,  so  he  took  his  gun  and  came  to  your  house  and 
tried  to  kill  you.  A  daft  lad  and  a  senseless  deed  and  an 
awful,  awful  end  to  it,  but  we  can  read  the  frantic 
thoughts  in  hi&  grief-struck  brain,  we  can  understand 
them,  Reuben — you  and  I."  She  sought  to  draw  him  into 
partnership  with  her,  to  make  him  share  in  the  plea  which 
she  addressed  to  him. 

But  "He  killed  my  wife,"  Reuben  said  again. 

She  had  a  momentary  vision  of  Reuben  and  Phoebe 
twenty  years  ago  riding  home  to  Bradshaw's  on  the  after- 
noon when  they  had  met  Dorothy  in  the  road,  and  Dorothy 
had  cut  him.  She  had  talked  then,  she  had  chattered,  she 
had  striven  to  be  gay  and  her  talk  had  rebounded,  like  a 


138  HEPPLESTALL'S 

ball  off  a  wall,  from  the  stony  taciturnity  of  his  abstrac- 
tion and  that  night,  that  very  night.  ...  It  had  been 
Dorothy  then,  and  it  was  Dorothy  now.  "He  killed  my 
wife." 

"But,  Reuben,  he  was  mad." 

"Still—" 

She  flung  herself  upon  her  knees.  "Reuben,  you  cannot 
hang  your  son.     Not  your  son,  Reuben." 

"Quiet,"  he  commanded.     "Quiet," 

*'0h,  I  will  be  very  quiet."  She  lowered  her  voice 
obediently,  "If  there  are  clerks  through  that  door,  they 
shall  not  hear.  No  one  shall  ever  know  he  is  your  son. 
You  can  save  him  and  you  must.  He  is  your  son  and 
there  are  babies,  two  little  boys,  your  grandchildren, 
Reuben,  What  can  I  do  alone  for  them.''  Give  John 
back  to  me  and  we  can  manage.  It  will  be  mortal  hard, 
but  we  shall  do  it." 

The  woman  was  impossible.  Actually  she  was  plead- 
ing not  only  for  the  murderer's  release,  but  for  his  return. 
His  wife,  Dorothy,  lay  dead  at  this  boj^'s  hands,  and 
Phoebe  was  assuming  that  nothing  was  to  happen !  But, 
by  the  Lord,  things  were  going  to  happen.  Crazy  or  not 
that  phrase  of  John's  stuck  in  his  throat — "to  set  the 
people  free  from  a  tyrant."  Where  there  was  one  man 
thinking  that  sort  of  thing,  there  were  others ;  it  was  a 
breeding  sort  of  thought.  Well,  he'd  sterilize  it,  he'd 
bleed  these  thinkers  white.  Meantime,  there  was  Phoebe, 
and,  it  seemed,  there  were  two  young  encumbrances. 
"There  is  the  workhouse,"  he  said. 

"Not  while  I  live,"  said  Peter  Bradshaw's  daughter. 

"But  to  live,  Phoebe,  you  must  earn,  and  there  will  be 
no  more  earning  here  for  you."  The  workhouse  was  a 
safe  place  for  a  woman  with  a  dangerous  story  and  any- 
thing that  escaued  those  muffling  walls  could  be  set  down 


THE  HATE  OF  THE  HEPPLESTALLS     139 

as  the  frantic  ravings  of  a  hanged  man's  mother.  This 
side-issue  of  Phoebe  was  a  triviality,  but  he  had  learned 
the  value  of  looking  after  the  pence — as  well  as  the 
pounds. 

"Oh,  do  with  me  what  you  like.  You  always  have  done. 
But  John — John !" 

He  looked  his  unchanging  answer. 

"I  am  to  go  to  the  workhouse.  Is  not  that  enough?  I 
to  that  place  and  his  children  with  me,  John  to — to  the 
gallows,  and  why?  \Vliy?  Because  through  all  these 
years  I  have  given  you  a  gift.  The  gift  of  my  silence. 
You  are  going  to  hang  my  son  because  I  did  not  tell  him 
he  was  your  son.  You  could  save  him  and  you  don't  be- 
cause he  did  not  know.  Reuben,  is  there  no  mercy  in 
you?"  There  was  none.  John  had  killed  Dorothy. 
"Then,  if  I  shriek  the  truth  aloud?  If  I  cry  out  now  so 
that  your  clerks  can  hear  me,  that  John  is  your  son? 
If—" 

**It  would  make  this  difference,  Phoebe.  You  would 
go  to  the  madhouse,  instead  of  to  the  workhouse.  In  the 
one  you  would  be  alone.  In  the  other  you  would  some- 
times see  John's  brats."  He  rang  the  hand-bell  on  his 
desk. 

"And  teach  them,"  she  said,  "teach  them  to  speak  their 
first  words,  'I  hate  the  Hepplestalls.'  " 

Perhaps  he  heard  her  through  the  sound  of  the  bell,  per- 
haps not.  A  well-drilled  clerk  came  promptly  in  upon  his 
summons.  "Tliis  woman  is  to  go  at  once  to  the  work- 
house, with  two  children,"  he  said.  "If  there  are  forms  to 
go  through  refer  the  officials  to  me." 

In  the  factory  they  called  him  "Master."  He  was 
master  of  them  all.      She  did  not  doubt  it  and  she  went. 

Reuben  finished  reading  his  letters  before  he  went  home 
to   breakfast.     He   read   attentively,    doing   accustomed 


140  HEPPLESTALL'S 

things  in  his  accustomed  way  because  it  seemed  that  only 
so  could  he  drug  himself  to  forgetfulness  of  Dorothy's 
death,  then  gravely,  with  thoughts  held  firmly  on  business 
affairs,  he  mounted  his  horse  to  where  skilled  hands  had 
made  death's  aftermath  a.  gracious  thing. 

Edward  had  spoken  to  his  brothers.  "Give  me  five 
minutes  alone  with  Father  when  he  comes,  in,"  he  said.  It 
seemed  to  him  this  morning  that  once,  a  prodigious  while 
ago,  he  had  been  fatuously  young  and  either  he  had 
quarreled  with  his  father  or  had  come  near  to  quarreling 
— he  couldn't  be  expected  to  remember  which  across  so 
long  a  time  as  the  night  he  had  passed  since  then — about 
so  obvious  a  certainty  as  his  going  into  the  factory. 
Dorothy,  in  that  moment  when  she  held  their  hands  to- 
gether, had  made  him  see  so  clearly  what  he  had  to  do. 
A  moment  of  reconcilement  and  of  clarification,  when  she 
had  indicated  her  last  wish.  It  was  a  law,  indeed,  and 
sweetly  sane.  "Why,  of  course,  Mother,"  he  had  been 
telling  her  through  the  night,  "Father  and  I  must  stand 
together  now."  He  told,  and  she  could  not  reply.  She 
could  not  tell  him  how  grotesquely  he  misinterpreted  her 
moment. 

He  met  Reuben  at  the  door.  "Father,"  he  said,  "there 
is  something  you  must  let  me  say  at  once.  My  mother 
joined  our  hands  last  night.  May  we  forget  what  passed 
between  us  earlier?  May  we  remember  only  that  she 
joined  our  hands  last  night,  and  that  they  will  remain 
joined.''" 

"I  hope  they  will,"  said  Reuben,  not  quite  certain  of 
him  vet. 

"The  man  who  killed  her  came  from  the  factory.  I 
should  like  your  permission  to  omit  my  last  term  at  Ox- 
ford. I  want  very  deeply  to  begin  immediately  at  the 
factory."  His  voice  rose  uncontrollably.  "*Drive  or  be 
driven,'  sir,  you  said  the  other  day.     And  by  God,  I'll 


THE  HATE  OF  THE  HEPPLESTALLS     141 

drive.     I'll  drive.     That  blackguard  came  from  there." 
"Come  with  me  after  breakfast,"  Reuben  said,  shak- 
ing the  hand  of  his   heir.     And   in   that   spirit   Edward 
went  to  Hepplestall's  to  begin  his  education. 

Dorothy  had  died  happy  in  the  bright   certainty  of 
her  authentic  moment! 


PART  II 


CHAPTER  I 


THE    SERVICE 


<  i  TF  there  is  a  man  whose  job  I've  never  envied,  it's  the 

A    Prince   of  Wales,"   groaned  Rupert   Hepplestall, 

looking-  in  his  mirror  with  an  air  of  cynical  boredom  and 

fastening  wliite  linen  round  a  bronzed  neck.     "And  I'm 

going  to  get  the  taste  of  it  to-day.'* 

The  point  was  that  it  was  Rupert's  sixteenth  birthday, 
and  the  sixteenth  birthday  of  a  Hepplestall  was  an  oc- 
casion of  such  moment  that  he  had  been  brought  back 
from  Harrow  to  spend  that  day  at  home. 

On  their  sixteenth  birthdays,  the  Hepplestall  boys,  and 
some  others  who  were  favored  though  only  their  mothers 
were  Hepplestalls,  were  received  in  the  office  and  from 
thence  escorted  through  the  mills  by  the  Head  of  the  Firm 
with  as  much  ceremonious  aplomb  as  if  they  were  Chinese 
mandarins,  Argentine  financiers,  Wall  Street  magnates, 
Russian  nobles,  German  professors  or  any  of  the  miscel- 
laneous but  always  distinguished  foreigners,  who,  visiting 
Lancashire,  procured  invitations  to  inspect  that  jewel  in 
its  crown,  the  mills  at  Staithley  Bridge.  For  the  boys  it 
was  the  formal  ritual  of  initiation  into  the  service  of  the 
firm.  A  coming  of  age  was  nothing  if  not  anti-climactic 
to  the  sixteenth  birthday  of  a  Hepplestall. 

Not  all  Hepplestalls  were  chosen  ;  there  were  black  sheep 

in  every  flock,  but  if  a  Hepplestall  meant  to  go  black,  he 

was  expected  to  show  symptoms  early  and  in  Rupert's 

145 


146  HEPPLESTALL'S 

case,  at  any  rate,  there  was  no  question  of  choice.     Ru- 
pert was  the  eldest  son. 

He  would  return  to  school,  he  would  go  to  a  university, 
but  to-day  he  set  foot  in  the  mills,  and  the  step  was  final. 
The  Service  would  have  marked  him  for  its  own. 

Rupert  was  cynical  about  it.  "It's  like  getting  en- 
gaged to  a  barmaid  in  the  full  and  certain  knowledge  that 
you  can't  buy  her  off,"  he  said  and  that  *'Barmaid"  indi- 
cated what  he  secretly  thought  of  the  show-mills  of  Lan- 
cashire. But  he  was  not  proposing  resistance;  he  was 
going  into  this  with  open  eyes ;  he  knew  what  had  happened 
to  that  recreant  Hepplestall  who,  so  to  speak,  had  broken 
his  vows — the  man  who  bolted,  last  heard  of  as  a  hanger-on 
in  a  gambling  hell  in  Dawson  City,  "combined,"  the  in- 
formant had  said,  "with  opium."  It  wasn't  for  Rupert. 
He  knew  on  which  side  his  bread  was  buttered.  But 
"Damn  the  hors  d'oeuvres,"  he  said.  *'Damn  to-day." 
Then,  "Pull  yourself  together.  Won't  do  to  look  peevish. 
Come,  be  a  little  prince." 

He  composed  in  front  of  the  mirror  a  compromise  be- 
tween boyish  eagerness  and  an  overwhelming  sense  of  a 
dignified  occasion,  surveyed  his  reflection  and  decided  that 
he  was  hitting  off  very  neatly  the  combination  of  aspects 
which  his  father  would  expect.  Then  he  jeered  at  his 
efforts  and  the  jeer  degenerated  into  an  agitated  giggle: 
he  was  uncomfortably  nervous^  "This  prince  business 
wants  getting  used  to,"  he  said,  recapturing  his  calculated 
expression  and  going  downstairs  to  the  breakfast  room. 

Only  his  father  and  mother  were  there.  To-night  there 
would  be  a  dinner  attended  by  such  uncles  as  were  not 
abroad  in  the  service  of  the  firm,  but  for  the  present  he 
was  spared  numbers  and  it  seemed  a  very  ordinary  birth- 
day when  his  mother  kissed  him  with  good  wishes  and  his 
father  shook  his  hand  and  left  a  ten  pound  note 
in  it. 


THE  SERVICE  147 

He  expected  an  oration  from  his  father,  but  what  Sir 
Philip  said  was  "Tyldesley's  not  out,  Rupert.  143. 
Would  you  like  to  go  to  Old  Trafford  after  lunch?" 

*'To-day !"  he  gasped.  Could  normal  things  like  cricket 
co-exist  with  his  ordeal? 

"Yes,  I  think  I  can  spare  the  time  this  afternoon,"  and 
so  on,  to  a  discussion  of  Lancashire's  chances  of  being  the 
champion  county — anything  to  put  the  boy  at  his  ease. 
Sir  Philip  had  been  through  that  ordeal  himself.  He 
talked  cricket  informally,  but  what  he  was  thinking  was 
*'Shall  I  tell  him  he's  forgotten  to  put  a  tie  on  or  shall 
I  take  him  round  the  place  without?"  But  he  could 
hardly  introduce  a  tie-less  heir  to  the  departmental  man- 
agers, who,  if  they  were  employees  had  salaries  running 
up  to  fifteen  hundred  a  year,  with  bonus,  and  were,  quite 
a  surprising  number  of  them,  magistrates.  So  he  pro- 
ceeded to  let  the  boy  down  gently.  "Heredity's  a  queer 
thing,"  he  said.  *'It's  natural  to  think  of  it  to-day,  and 
I  shall  have  some  instances  to  tell  you  of  later,  when  we 
get  down  to  the  office.  But  what  sets  me  on  it  now  is 
that  precisely  the  same  accident  happened  to  me  on  my  six- 
teenth birthday  as  has  happened  to  yqu.  I  forgot  my 
tie." 

"Oh,  Lord !"  Rupert  was  aghast,  feeling  with  twitch- 
ing finger's  for  the  tie  that  wasn't  there. 

*'I  take  it  as  a  happy  omen  that  you  should  have  done 
the  same." 

'You  really  did  forget  yours,  dad?" 

'Really,"  lied  Sir  Pliilip. 

'Then  I  don't  mind  feeling  an  ass,"  said  Rupert,  and 
his  father  savored  the  compliment  as  Rupert  left  the  room. 
It  implied  that  the  boy  had  a  wholesome  respect  for  him, 
while,  as  to  his  own  diplomacy,  "The  recording  angel,"  he 
said,  turning  to  his  wife,  "will  dip  in  invisible  ink." 

Lady  Hepplestall  touched  his  shoulder  affectionately. 


"1 


148  HEPPLESTALL'S 

and  left  him  to  his  breakfast-table  study  of  the  market 
reports. 

The  baronetcy  was  comparatively  new.  Any  time  these 
fifty  years  the  Hepplestalls  could  have  had  it  by  lifting 
a  finger  in  the  right  room ;  and  they  had  had  access  to 
that  room.  But  titles,  especially  as  the  Victorian  shower 
of  honors  culminated  in  "Jubilee  Knights,"  seemed  vulgar 
things,  and  Sir  Philip  consented  to  take  one  only  when 
it  seemed  necessary  that  he  should  consent,  after  much 
pressure  from  his  brothers.  It  seemed  necessary  in  1905 
and  the  Hepplestall  baronetcy,  included  amongst  the 
Resignation  Honors  conferred  by  the  late  Balfour  ad- 
ministration, was  a  symbol  of  the  defeat  of  Joseph  Cham- 
berlain and  "Tariff  Reform."  It  advertised  the  sound- 
ness of  the  Unionist  Party,  even  in  the  thick  of  the  great 
landslide  of  Liberalism,  it  registered  the  close  of  the 
liaison  with  Protection.  If  Hepplestall  of  Lancashire, 
Unionist  and  Free  Trader,  accepted  a  baronetcy  from  the 
outgoing  Government,  the  sign  was  clear  for  all  to  read; 
it  could  mean  only  that  Hepplestall  had  received  assur- 
ances that  the  Party  was  going  to  be  good,  to  avoid  the 
horrific  pitfalls  of  "Tariff  Reform."  Lancashire  could 
breathe  again  and  Sir  Philip,  saci'ificing  much,  immolated 
his  inclinations  on  the  twin  altars  of  Free  Trade  and  the 
Part}'.  If  ever  man  became  baronet  pour  le  bon  motif,  it 
was  Sir  Philip  Hepplestall.     A  gesture,  but  a  gallant  one. 

Rupert  spoke  many  things  aloud  in  lurid  English  to  his 
reflection  in  his  mirror;  the  banality  of  having  so  care- 
fully studied  his  facial  expressions  while  not  perceiving 
the  absence  of  a  tie  struck  him  as  pluperfect,  but  his 
vituperative  language  was,  happily,  adequate  to  the  oc- 
casion and  he  successfully'  relieved  his  feelings.  One  com- 
bination of  words,  indeed,  struck  him  as  inspired  and  he 
was  occupied  in  committing  it  to  memory  as  he  went  down- 
stairs to  Sir  Philip. 


THE  SERVICE  149 

"I  feel  like  the  kid  who  had  too  much  cake  and  when 
they  told  him  he^d  be  ill,  he  said  it  was  worth  it,"  he  an- 
nounced.    "It  was  worth  it  to  forget  my  tie." 

"In  what  way  in  particular?"  asked  Sir  Philip,  mentally 
saluting  a  spirited  recovery. 

"Will  you  ask  me  that  next  time  I  beat  you  at  golf  and 
words  fail  you?     I've  got  the  words*." 

Anyhow,  he'd  got  his  impudence  back  and  Sir  Philip, 
knowing  the  massive  impressiveness  of  the  mills,  was  glad 
of  it.  He  wanted  his  boy  to  bear  himself  well  that  day, 
and  he  was  not  afraid  of  levity  or  over-confidence  when 
he  confronted  him  with  Hepplestall's.  He  had,  he  ad- 
mitted to  himself,  feared  timidity;  he  had,  at  any  rate, 
diagnosed  acute  nervousness  in  Rupert's  breakfast-table 
appearance,  and  feeling  that  the  attack  was  vanished  now, 
he  rang  for  the  car  with  his  mind  easy. 

The  site  of  old  Reuben's  "Dorothy"  factory  wa,s  still 
the  center  whose  extended  perimeter  held  the  mills  known 
to  Lancashire,  and  nearly  as  well  known  to  dealers  in 
Shanghai,  or  in  the  Malji  Jritha  market,  Bombay,  as  Hep- 
plestall's, but  the  town  of  Staitliley  Bridge  lay  in  the 
valley,  extending  down-stream  away  from  the  mills,  so  that 
there  was  country  still,  smoky  but  pleasant,  between  the 
Hall  and  the  town.  Electric  trams  bumped  up  the  in- 
clines through  sprawling  main-streets  off  which  ran  the 
rows  upon  uniform  rows  of  cell-like  houses,  back-to-back, 
airless,  bathless,  insanitary,  in  which  the  bulk  of  the 
workers  lived.  Further  afield,  there  were  better,  more 
modern  houses,  costing  no  more  than  those  built  before 
the  affe  of  sanitation — and  these  were  more  often  to  be  let 
than  the  houses  of  the  close-packed  center.  It  may  have 
been  considered  bumptious  in  Staithley  to  demand  a  bath, 
and  a  back-garden;  it  may  have  been  held  that,  if  one 
lived  in  Staithley,  one  should  do  the  thing  thoroughly ;  or 
it  may  have  been  that  cleanliness  too  easily  attained  was 


150  HEPPLESTALL'S 

thought  equivalent  to  taking  a  light  view  of  life.  In  their 
rooms,  if  not  in  their  persons,  they  were  clean  in  Staithley, 
even  to  the  point  of  being  "house-proud"  about  their 
cleanliness;  but  medicine  that  does  not  taste  foul  is  sus- 
pect, and  so  is  cleanliness  in  a  house  when  it  is  attained 
without  the  greatest  possible  mortification  of  female  flesh. 
You  didn't,  anyhow,  bribe  a  Staithley  man  by  an  electric 
tram  and  a  bright  brick  house  with  a  bath  to  **flit'* 
from  his  gray  stone  house  in  an  interminable  row  when 
that  house  was  within  reasonable  walking  distance  of  the 
mills  or  the  pits.  No  decentralization  for  him,  if  he 
could  help  it :  he  was  townbred,  in  a  place  where  coal  was 
cheap  and  fires  extravagant,  and  a  back  garden  was  a 
draughty,  sliiversome  idea. 

But  all  this  compress  of  humanity,  and  the  joint  efforts 
of  the  municipality  and  the  jerry-builder  to  relieve  it,  lay 
on  the  side  of  the  mills  remote  from  the  Hall — old  Reuben 
had  seen  far  enough  to  plant  the  early  Staithley  out  of 
his  sight,  and  where  he  planted  it,  it  grew — and  the  short 
drive  through  dairy  farm-land  and  market-gardens  was 
not  distressing  to  eyes  accustomed  to  the  pseudo-green, 
sobered  by  smoke,  of  Lancashire.  Nor  had  the  private 
office  of  the  Hepplestalls  any  eyesores  for  the  neophyte. 
He  had  been  in  less  comfortable  club-rooms. 

Indeed,  this  office,  with  its  great  fireplace,  its  Turkey 
carpet,  its  shapely  bureau  that  had  been  Reuben's,  and 
its  chairs,  authentically  old,  chosen  to  be  on  terms  with 
the  historic  bureau,  its  padded  leather  sofa  and  the  arm- 
chairs before  the  fire,  and  above  all,  the  paintings  on  the 
wall,  had  all  the  appearance  of  a  writing-room  in  a 
wealthy  club. 

"This  is  where  I  work,  Rupert,"  said  Sir  Philip,  and 
Rupert  wondered  if  "work"  was  quite  the  justifiable  word. 
He  thought  the  room  urbane  and  almost  drowsily  urbane, 
he  thought  of  work  rather  as  the  Staithley  people  thought 


THE  SERVICE  151 

of  cleanliness,  as  a  thing  that  went  with  mortification  of 
the  flesh,  and  things  looked  very  eas>^  in  this  room.  But 
he  reserved  judgment.  Sir  Philip  was  apt  to  come  home 
looking  very  tired.     Perhaps  the  easiness  was  deceptive. 

A  telephone  rang,  and  his  father  went  to  the  instrument 
with  an  apology.     "This  is  your  day,  Rupert,  but  I  must 
steal  five  minutes  of  it  now."     He  spoke  to  his  broker  in 
Liverpool,    and  there  were   little  jokes    and    affabilities 
mingled  Avith  mysterious  references  to  "points  on"  and 
other  teclmicalities.     There  was  an  argument  about  the 
"points  on,**  and  Sir  Philip  seemed  very  easily  to  get  the 
better  of  it,  and  then,  having  bought  a  thousand  bales  of 
raw  cotton  futures,  he  put  the  telephone  down  and  said, 
"That's    the    end    of  business    for    to-day."     An   insider 
would  have  known  that  something  rather  important  had 
happened,   that   the  brain   of   Sir  Philip  had   been  very 
active  indeed  in  those  few  minutes  when  he  lingered  over 
the  market-reports   at  the  breakfast-table,  that  trained 
judgment  had  decided  a  largish  issue  and  that  a  brilliant 
exhibition  of  the  art  of  buying  had  been  given  on  the  tele- 
phone.    Rupert's    impression    was    that    some   enigmatic 
figures  had  casually  intruded  while  Sir  Philip  passed  the 
time  of  day  with  a  friend  in  Liverpool  who  had  rather 
superfluously  rung  him  up.     At   Harrow,  veneration  of 
the  business  man  was  at  a  discount,  and  he  believed  Har- 
row was  right.     To  write  Greek  verse  was  a  stiffer  job 
than  to  be  a  cotton-lord — on  the  evidence  so  far  before 
the  court. 

"Well,"  said  Sir  Philip,  "I'm  going  to  try  to  show  you 
what  Hepplestall's  is,  and  the  portraits  on  these  walls 
make  as  good  a  starting-point  as  I  can  think  of.  That  is 
Reuben,  our  Founder.  There  are  a  few  extant  businesses 
in  Lancashire  founded  sa  long  ago  as  ours ;  there  are  even 
older  firms.  But  such  age  as  ours  is  rare.  It's  been  an 
in-and-out  business,  the  cotton  trade.     You  know  the  pro- 


152  HEPPLESTALL'S 

verb  here  that  "It's  three  generations  from  clogs  to 
clogs."  That  is,  some  fine  fellow  bom  to  nothing  makes  a 
mark  in  life,  rises,  fights  his  way,  and  beginning  as  man 
ends  as  master,  giving  the  business  he  founded  such 
momentum  as  carries  it  along  for  the  next  generation. 
His  son  is  born  to  boots,  not  clogs,  but  he  hasn't  as  a  rule 
the  strength  his  father  had.  He's  lived  soft  and  his  stock 
degenerates  through  softness.  The  business  of  the  old 
man  doesn't  go  to  pieces  in  the  son's  time,  but  it  travels 
downhill  as  the  momentum  given  it  by  its  founder  loses 
force.  And  the  grandson  of  the  founder  is  apt  to  be  bom 
to  boots  and  to  die  in  clogs ;  lie  begins  as  master  and  ends 
as  man.  That  is  the  cycle  of  three  generations  on  which 
that  proverb  is  founded,  and  not  unjustly  founded.  It's 
one  of  the  points  about  the  cotton  trade  that  a  strong 
man  could  force  his  way  out  of  the  ranks,  but  it's  the  fact 
that  his  successors  were  more  likely  to  lose  what  he  left 
them  than  to  keep  it  or  improve  upon  it.  I'll  go  so  far 
as  to  say  that  making  money  is  easier  than  keeping  it. 

"We  Hepplestalls  have  had  the  gift  of  keeping  it. 
Wliat  a  father  won,  a  son  has  not  let  go.  The  sons  have 
been  fighters  like  their  fathers  before  them  and  with  each 
son  the  battleground  has  growm.  Well,  that  might  terrify 
you  if  I  don't  explain  that  long  ago,  in  your  great-grand- 
father's time  indeed,  the  firm  had  outgrown  the  power  of 
any  one  man  to  control  it  utterly.  There  were  partner- 
ships and  a  share  of  the  responsibility  for  the  younger 
sons.  More  recently,  in  fact  when  my  father  died,  we 
made  a  private  limited  company  of  it.  Two  of  your 
uncles,  Tom  and  William,  in  charge  in  Manchester,  have 
great  authority,  though  mine  is  the  final  word.  What  I 
am  seeking  to  tell  you  is  that  while  it  is  a  tremendous  thing 
— tremendous,  Rupert — to  be  the  Head  of  Hepplestall's, 
the  burden  is  not  one  which  you  will  ever  be  called  upon 
to  bear  single-handed.     The  day  of  the  camplete  autocrat 


THE  SERVICE  153 

went  long  a<go.  But  this  is  true,  that  the  Head  of  Hep- 
plestall's  has  been  the  general  in  command,  the  chief-of- 
staff,  the  man  who  guarded  what  liis  ancestors  had  won 
a>nd  who  increased  the  stake.  That  is  the  Hepplestall 
tradition  in  its  minimum  significance." 

Rupert  started.  In  spite  of  his  boyish  skepticism  he 
was  already  sieeing  himself  as  the  Lilliputian  changeling 
in  a  house  of  the  Brobdingnagians,  and  if  this  were  the 
minimum  tradition,  what,  he  wondered,  was  the  maximum .-^ 

"We  have  the  tradition  of  trusteeship,"  Sir  Philip  pro- 
ceeded. "And  the  trusteeship*  of  Hepplestall's  is  an 
anxious  burden.  It  includes  what  I  have  spoken  of  al- 
ready; it  includes  our  family  interests,  but  they  are  the 
smallest  portion  of  the  whole.  [\Ve  are  trustees  for  our 
workpeople :  we  do  not  coddle  them,  but  we  find  them  work. 
That  is  a  serious  matter,  Rupert.  I  have  of  course  be- 
come accustomed  to  it  as  3'ou  will  become  accustomed  to 
it,  but  the  thought  is  never  absent  from  my  mind  that  on 
us,  ultimately  on  me  alone,  is  laid  the  burden  of  proAdding 
work  for  our  thousands  of  employees.  Trade  fluctuates 
and  my  problem  is,  as  far  as  is  humanly  possible,  to  safe- 
guard our  people  against  unemployment." 

"I  never  thought  of  it  like  that,"  said  Rupert,  whose 
crude  ideas  of  Labor  were  rather  derived  from  his  public 
school,  and  occasional  reading  of  reactionary  London 
newspapers,  than  from  his  home.  "I  wonder  if  they  are 
grateful.?" 

"Their  gratitude  or  their  ingratitude  has  no  bearing  on 
my  duty,"  said  Sir  Philip. 

"But  aren't  there  strikes.?" 

"You  might  put  it  that  since  'ninety-three  we  h-ave 
bowdlerized  strikes  in  Lancashire.  We  fight  with  buttons 
on  our  foils,  thanks  to  the  Brooklands  agreement." 

Rupert  tried  to  look  comprehending,  but  he  could  only 
associate    motor-racing    with    Brooklands.     "Still,"    he 


154  HEPPLESTALL'S 

said,  "I  don't  believe  they  are  grateful.  There's  that 
Bradshaw  beast." 

"Ah!"  said  Philip,  "Bradshaw!  Bradshaw!"  The 
name  pricked  him  shrewdly.  "But  no,"  he  said,  "he's  not 
a  beast." 

"He's  Labor  Member  for  Staitliley,"  said  Rupert.  "I 
see  their  gratitude  less  and  less." 

"Well,"  said  his  father,  "we  were  speaking  of  tradition. 
The  Bradshaws  come  into  the  Hepplestall  tradition.  A 
wastrel  gang  and  queerly  against  us  in  every  period.  A 
Bradshaw  was  hanged  for  the  murder  of  Reuben's  wife. 
There  were  Chartist  Bradshaws,  two  turbulent  brothers, 
in  my  grandfather's  day.  In  my  day,  Tom  Bradshaw  was 
strike  leader  here  in  the  great  strike  of  'ninety-two." 

"And  they  sent  him  to  Parliament  for  it,"  said  Rupert 
hotly. 

*'Tom's  not  a  bad  fellow,  Rupert.  I  admit  he's  their 
masterpiece.  The  rest  of  the  Bradshaws  are  work-shys 
and  some  of  them  are  worse  than  that.  But  they  do  crop 
up  as  a  traditional  thorn  in  our  flesh  and  I  daresay  you'll 
have  your  battle  with  a  Bradshaw.  Nearly  every  Hep- 
plestall has  had,  but  if  he's  no  worse  a  chap  than  Tom, 
M.  P.,  you'll  have  a  clean  fighter  against  you.  But 
there's  a  more  serious  tradition  than  the  Bradshaws,  a 
fighting  tradition,  too,  a  Hepplestall  against  a  Hepple- 
stall, a  son  against  a  father." 

"Oh!"  Rupert  protested. 

*'Yes.  I  expect  to  have  my  fight  with  you.  It's  the 
march  of  progress.  Look  at  old  Reuben  there  and  Ed- 
ward his  son.  Reuben  was  a  fighter  for  steam  when  he 
was  young.  Other  people  thought  steam  visionary  then  If 
they  didn't  think  it  flat  blasphemy.  But  he  grew  old  and 
he  couldn't  rise  to  railways.  Edward  brought  the  rail- 
way to  Hepplestall's,  right  into  the  factory  yard,  in  the 
teeth  of  Reuben's  opposition  and  when  Reuben  saw  rail- 


THE  SERVICE  155 

way  trains  actually  doing  what  Edward  said  they  would 
do,  carrying  cotton  in  and  goods  out  and  coal  out  from 
the  pit-mouth,  he  retired.  He  gave  Edward  best  and 
went,  and  Edward  lit  the  factory  with  gas,  made  here 
from  his  own  coal,  and  Reuben  prophesied  fire  and  sudden 
death  and  the  only  death  that  came  was  his  own. 

"That  portrait  is  of  William,  Edward's  son.  Their 
fight  was  over  the  London  warehouse.  William  did  not 
see  why  we  sold  to  London  merchants  who  re-sold  to 
shops ;  and  William  had  his  way,  and  later  quarreled  with 
his  son  Martin  over  so  small  a  thing  as  the  telegraph. 
That  was  before  telephones,  and  you  had  an  alphabetical 
switchboard  and  slowly  spelt  out  sentences  on  it.  Wil- 
liam called  it  a  toy,  and  Martin  was  right  and  saved 
thousands  of  valuable  hours.  But  I  had  the  honor  of 
telling  my  father,  who  was  Martin,  that  he  had  an  inten- 
sive mind  and  that  lighting  the  mills  by  electricity,  and  re- 
building on  the  all-window  design  to  save  artificial  light 
and  installing  lifts  and  sprinklers  (to  keep  the  insurance 
low)  were  all  very  useful  economies  but  they  didn't  extend 
the  trade  of  Hepplestall's.  I  went  round  the  world  and 
I  established  branches  in  the  East.  I  didn't  see  why  the 
Manchester  shipping  merchants  should  market  Hepple- 
stall's Shirtings  in  Shanghai  and  Calcutta.  My  father 
told  me  I  had  bitten  off  more  than  I  could  chew,  but  he 
let  me  have  the  money  to  try  with.  Well,  there's  your 
uncle  Hubert  in  charge  at  Calcutta  now,  and  your  uncle 
Reuben  Bleackley  at  Shanghai,  you've  cousins  at  Rio  and 
Buenos  Aires  and  Montreal  and  on  the  whole  I  can  claim 
my  victory.  I  wonder,"  he  looked  quizzically  at  Rupert, 
"what  your  victory  over  me  will  he?  To  run  our  own 
line  of  steamers?  To  work  the  mills  by  electricity?  I 
give  you  warning  here  and  now  that  I'm  against  both. 
Oil — oil's  a  possibility ;  but  we  needn't  go  into  those  things 
now." 


156  HEPPLESTALL'S 


«i 


'I  hope  I  shall  never  oppose  you,  sir,"  said  Rupert. 

*'Then  you'll  be  no  true  Hepplestall — and  you  are  going 
to  be.  You'll  go  through  it  as  the  rest  of  us  went  through 
it,  and  you'll  come  out  tried  and  true.  I'll  tell  you  what 
I  mean  by  going  through  it.  That's  no  figure  of  speech. 
We  are  practical  men,  we  Hepplestalls,  every  man  of  us. 
We've  diverse  duties  and  responsibilities,  but  we've  a  com- 
mon knowledge,  and  an  exact  one,  of  the  processes  of  cot- 
ton manufacture.  We  all  got  it  in  the  same  way,  and  the 
only  right  way — not  by  theory,  not  by  looking  on,  but  by 
doing  with  our  own  hands  whatever  is  done  in  these  mills — 
or  nearly  everything.  You're  going  to  be  a  carder  and 
a  spinner  and  a  doubler  and  a  weaver.  You're  going  to 
come  into  the  place  at  six  in  the  morning  with  the  rest 
of  the  people  and  the  only  difference  between  you  and  them 
is  that  when  you've  learned  a  job  you'll  be  moved  on  to 
learn  another.  You'll  come  to  it  from  your  university 
and  you'll  hate  it.  You'll  hate  it  like  hell,  and  it'll  last 
two  years.  Then  you'll  have  a  year  in  Manchester  and 
then  you'll  go  round  the  world  to  every  branch  of  Hepple- 
stalls. In  about  five  years  after  you  come  here,  you'll  be- 
gin to  be  fit  to  work  with  me,  and  if  you  don't  make  a 
better  Head  than  I  am,  you'll  disappoint  me,  Rupert.'* 

Rupert  was  conscious  of  mutinous  impulses  as  his  father 
forecasted  the  rigorous  training  he  was  expected  to 
undergo.  How  cruel  a  mockery  was  that  suave  oflice  of 
Sir  Philip!  And  Sir  Philip  himself,  and  all  the  Hepple- 
stalls— they  had  all  submitted  to  the  training.  They  had 
all  been  "through  it."  And  they  called  England  a  free 
country !     Well,  he,  at  any  rate — 

He  felt  his  father's  hand  upon  his  knee,  and  looked  up 
from  his  meditations.  "It  is  a  trust,  Rupert,"  said  Sir 
Philip. 

Rupert  began  to  hate  that  word  and  perhaps  his  sup>- 
pressed    rebellion   hung   out    some   signs,   for    Sir   Philip 


THE  SERVICE  15T 

added,  almost,  but  not  quite,  as  if  he  were  making  an  ap- 
peal, "always  the  eldest  son  has  been  the  big  man  of  his 
time  amongst  the  Hepplestalls.  It  hasn't  been  position 
that's  made  us ;  each  eldest  son  has  made  himself,  each  has 
won  out  by  merit.  My  brothers  were  a  tough  lot,  but 
I'm  the  toughest.  And  you.  You  won't  spoil  the  record. 
You'll  be  the  big  man,  Rupert.  And  now  we'll  go  through, 
the  mill,"  he  went  on  briskly,  giving  Rupert  no  oppor- 
tunity to  reply. 

Rupert  was  shown  cotton  from  the  mixing  room  where 
the  bales  of  raw  material  were  opened,  through  its  proc- 
esses of  cleaning,  combing,  carding  to  tlie  spinning-mill 
whence  it  emerged  as  yarn  to  go  through  warping  and 
sizing  to  the  weaving  sheds  and  thence  to  the  packing 
rooms  where  the  pieces  were  made  up  and  stamped  for  the 
home  or  the  foreign  markets.  Hepplestall's  had  their 
side-lines  but  principally  they  were  concerned  with  the 
mass  production  of  cotton  shirtings  and  Rupert  was  given 
a  kinematographic  view  of  the  making  of  a  shirting  till, 
stamped  in  blue  with  the  world-famous  "Anchor"  brand, 
it  was  ready  for  the  warehouse,  which  might  be  anj'where 
from  Manchester  to  Valparaiso  or  Hongkong;  and  as 
they  went  through  the  rooms  he  was  introduced  to  man- 
agers, to  venerable  overseers  who  had  known  his  grand- 
father, fine  loyalists  who  shook  his  hand  as  if  he  were  in- 
deed a  prince,  and  everywhere  he  was  conscious  of  eyes 
that  bored  into  his  back,  envious,  hostile  sometimes,  but 
mostly  admiring  and  friendly.     He  was  the  heir. 

He  walked,  literally,  for  miles  amongst  these  men  and 
women  and  these  children  (there  were  children  still  in  the 
mills  of  Lancashire,  "half-timers,"  which  meant  that  they 
went  to  the  factory  for  half  the  day,  and  to  school  the 
other  half,  and  much  good  school  did  them  after  that 
exhilarating  morning!),  and  he  bore  himself  without  con- 
fessing openly  his  consciousness  that  he  was  not  so  much 


158  HEPPLESTALL'S 

inspecting  tlie  factory  as  being  inspected  by  it.  All  that 
he  saw,  he  loathed,  and  he  couldn't  rid  his  mind  of  the 
thought  that  he  was  condemned  to  hard  labor  in  these  sur- 
roundings.    But  there  were  mitigations. 

"And,"  said  a  white-haired  overseer  as  he  shook  Ru- 
pert's hand,  "  'appen  we  shall  see  you  playing  for  Lanky- 
sheer  one  of  these  days.'* 

"You  have  ambitions  for  me,"  he  smiled  back. 

*'Well,  you're  on  the  road  to  it." 

That  was  the  delightful  thing,  that  they  should  know 
that  he  was  on  the  road  to  it.  They  must  be  keenly  inter- 
ested to  know  so  much  when  his  place  in  the  Harrow  first 
eleven  was  only  a  prospect — as  yet — a  pretty  secure  pros- 
pect, but  one  of  those  intimate  securities  which  were  de- 
cidedly not  published  news.  It  was  a  reconciling  touch, 
bracing  him  to  keep  up  his  gallant  show  as  they  made  their 
progress,  but  neither  tlus  nor  the  self-respecting  deference 
of  the  high-salaried,  efficient  managers  resigned  him  to  the 
price  he  was  expected  to  pay  for  being  Hepplestall.  That 
dour  apprenticeship,  which  Sir  Pliilip  had  candidly 
prophesied  he  would  "hate  like  hell,"  daunted  him;  those 
five  years  out  of  liis  life  before  he  "began  to  work."  It 
was  a  tradition  of  the  service,  was  it.**  Then  it  was  a  bad 
tradition.  He  didn't  object  to  serve,  but  this  was  to 
make  seri-^ice  into  slavery. 

Allowing  for  school  and  university,  he  wouldn't  come  to 
it  for  another  six  years  yet,  and  by  then  he  ought  to  be 
better  equipped  for  a  rebellion.  But — the  infernal  cun- 
ning of  this  sixteenth-birthday  initiation — it  would  be  too 
late  then.  From  to-day,  if  he  let  the  day  pass  without 
protest,  he  wore  the  chains  of  slavery,  he  was  doomed, 
marked  down  for  sacrifice,  and  he  was  so  young!  He  re- 
sented the  unfairness  of  his  youth  pitted  in  unequal  con- 
flict with  his  father. 

"One  last  tradition  of  the  Hepplestalls,  Rupert,"  Sir 


THE  SERVICE  159 

Philip  said  as  they  returned  to  his  office,  "though  I  'expect 
you're  hating  the  word  'tradition.'  "  Oh,  did  his  father 
understand  everything  and  forestall  it?  "The  eldest  sons 
have  not  come  to  it  easily.  Sometimes  there's  been  open 
refusal.  There've  been  ugly  rows.  There's  always  been 
a  feeling  on  the  son's  part  that  the  terms  of  service  were 
too  harsh.  Well,  I  have  come  to  know  that  they  are 
necessary  terms.  We  are  masters  of  men,  and  we  gain 
mastery  of  ourselves  in  those  days  when  we  learn  our 
trade  by  the  side  of  the  tradesmen.  We  cannot  take  this 
great  place  of  ours  lightly,  not  Hepplestall's,  not  the 
heavy  trust  that  is  laid  upon  us.  We  cannot  risk  the 
failure  of  a  Hepplestall  through  lack  of  knowledge  of  his 
trade  or  through  personal  indiscipline.  Imagination,  the 
gifts  of  leadership  are  things  we  cannot  give  you  here; 
either  you  have  them  in  you  or  you  will  never  have  them, 
and  it  is  reasonable  to  think  you  have  them.  They  have 
seemed  to  be  the  birthright  of  a  Hepplestall.  But  we  can 
train  you  to  their  use. 

"There  is  that  Japanese  ideal  of  the  Samurai.  I  don't 
think  that  it  is  absent  from  our  English  life,  but  perhaps 
we  have  not  been  very  explicit  about  our  ideals.  There's 
money  made  here,  and  if  I  told  some  people  that  what 
actuates  me  is  not  money  but  the  idea  of  service,  I  should 
not  be  believed.  I  should  be  told  that  I  confused  Mam- 
mon with  God:  but  I  am  here  to  serve,  and  money  is  in- 
escapable because  money  is  the  index  of  successful  service 
in  present  day  conditions.  Service,  not  money,  is  the 
mainspring  of  the  Hepplestalls,  the  service  of  England 
because  it  is  the  service  of  Lancashire.  We  lead — not  ex- 
clusively but  we  are  of  the  leaders — in  Lancashire.  We 
are  keepers  of  the  cotton  trade,  trustees  of  its  efficiency, 
guarantors  of  its  progress. 

"I  am  earnest  with  you,  Rupert.  Probably  I'm  offend- 
ing your  sense  of  decent  reticence.     Ideals  are  things  to 


160  HEPPLESTALL'S 

be  private  about,  but  let  us  just  for  once  talce  the  wrap- 
pings off  them  and  let  us  have  a  look  at  them.  .  .  . 
Well,  we've  looked  and  we'll  hide  them  again,  but  we  won't 
forget  they're  there.  I  suppose  we  keep  a  shop,  but  the 
soul  of  the  shopkeepers  isn't  in  the  cash-register." 

How  could  he  reply  to  this  that  the  training  which  had 
been  good  enough  for  his  father  and  his  uncles  was  not 
good  enough  for  him?  Somewhere,  he  felt  certain  there 
were  flaws  to  be  found  and  that  Sir  Philip  was  rather  a 
special  pleader  than  a  candid  truth-teller,  but  he  im- 
pressed, and  Rupert  despised  himself  for  remaining  ob- 
stinatel}'  suspicious  of  his  father's  sincerity. 

"And  3'ou're  a  Hepplestall.  That  is  not  to  be  ques- 
tioned, is  it,  Rupert?  In  the  present  and  in  the  future, 
in  the  small  things  and  the  large,  that  is  not  to  be  ques- 
tioned." 

It  was  now  or  never  for  his  protest.  Mentally  he  wrig- 
gled like  a  kitten  held  under  water  by  some  callous  child 
and  as  desperately.  He  would  drown  if  he  could  not 
reach  the  aid  of  two  life-buoys,  courage  to  outface  Sir 
Philip  and  wits  to  put  words  to  his  thoughts. 

"No,  sir,  that  is  not  to  be  questioned,"  he  heard  him- 
self, unexpectedly,  say,  and  Sir  Philip's  warm  handshake 
sealed  the  bargain.  He  had  not  meant  to  say  it;  he  did 
not  mean  to  stand  by  what  he  had  said,  but  his  hand  re- 
sponded heartily  to  his  father's  and  his  eye  met  Sir 
Philip's  gaze  with  the  charming  smile  of  frank,  ingenu- 
ous youth. 

He  was  thinking  that  six  years  were  a  long  time  and 
that  there  were  men  who  had  come  to  great  honor  after 
they  had  broken  vows. 


CHAPTER  II 

THE  VOICE  FROM  THE  STREET 

THE  room  held  a  grand  piano,  a  great  fire  and  two 
men  of  fifty  who  were  playing  chess.  The  stout, 
bullet-headed  man  with  the  mustache  which  did  not  con- 
ceal the  firmness  of  his  mouth  was  Tom  Bradshaw;  the 
lean  man  with  the  goatee  beard,  who  wore  spectacles,  was 
Walter  Pate.  Both  were  autocrats  in  their  way.  Tom 
ran  the  Spinners'  Union  and  was  M.  P.  in  his  spare  time, 
Walter  ran  music  in  Staitliley  Bridge  and  had  no  spare 
time  except,  on  rare  occasions,  for  chess. 

Tom  made  a  move.  "That's  done  you,  you  beggar," 
he  said,  gleefully  rising  and  filling  a  pipe. 

Walter's  fine  hand  flickered  uncertainly  over  the  board. 
He  saw  defeat  ahead.  "If  I  weren't  a  poor  man,  I'd  have 
the  law  on  you,"  he  said. 

*'You  can't  play  chess,  Walter.  It's  a  question  of 
brain." 

Pate  shied  the  matches  at  Iiim,  and  Tom  sat  at  the 
piano  and  picked  out  a  tune  with  one  hand. 

"Stop  it !"  cried  Walter. 

*'0n  terms,"  said  Tom. 

*'I  hate  you,"  said  Walter.     "Come  away." 

*'The  terms  are  the  Meistersinger,"  said  Tom. 

"On  a  piano !     You're  a  Goth." 

"No.  I'm  paying  you  a  compliment  you  deserve.  Get 
at  it." 

Walter  got. 

Young  Rupert  in  his  Slough  of  Despond  had  been  too 

161 


162  HEPPLEST.\LL'S 

busy  with  himself  to  wonder  why  Sir  Philip  had  corrected 
him  when  he  described  Tom  Bradshaw  as  a  "beast." 

At  his  mother's  knee,  Tom,  like  all  the  Bradshaws  of 
the  seed  of  Jolm,  had  lisped,  "  'A  'ate  th'  'epplestalls," 
and,  when  he  was  a  little  older,  had  learned  that  he  hated 
them  "Because  they're  dirty  thieves.  Because  yon  mills 
o'  theirn  are  ourn  by  rights."  This  was  not  socialism  and 
had  nothing  to  do  with  the  doctrine  that  all  property 
is  theft ;  it  was  the  family  superstition  of  the  Bradshaws, 
and  they  believed  it  as  the  first  article  of  their  faith. 

They  believed  it  blindly  and  perhaps  none  of  them  were 
eager  to  have  their  e3'es  opened  because  other  people's 
eyes  might  have  been  opened  at  the  same  time  and,  as 
things  usefully  were,  it  was  romantic  to  be  the  wronged 
heirs  to  Hepplestall's.  It  excused  so  much,  it  invited  com- 
passion for  the  victims  of  injustice,  it  extorted  charity  for 
these  martyrs  to  foul  play.  Details  were  conspicuously 
lacking,  but  the  legend  had  life  and  won  sympathy  for  the 
view  the  Bradshaws  took  of  themselves — that  tliey  couldn't 
be  expected  to  go  to  work  in  the  mills  of  the  usurping 
Hepplestalls.  As  a  family,  they  were  professional  cad- 
gers whose  stock-in-trade  was  their  legend,  and  Staithley 
held  enough  people  who  were  credulous  or  who  were  "agin 
the  government"  on  principle  (whether  they  took  the  Brad- 
shaw claim  seriously  or  not)  to  make  the  legend  a  profit- 
able asset.  Repetition  is  infallible,  as  the  advertiser 
knows,  and  these  ragged  Ortons  of  the  Staithley  slums  had 
plenty  of  adherents. 

There  were  several  scores  of  ways  of  earning  a  liveli- 
hood in  Staithley  without  working  at  Hepplestall's,  but 
the  average  Bradshaw  pretended  that  as  a  natural  pride 
prevented  him  from  serving  the  despoiler,  he  was  barred 
from  work  entirely,  though  he  did  not  object  to  his  chil- 
dren working  for  him,  and  Tom  began  as  a  half-timer  in 
the  mills.     A  bad  time  he  had  of  it  too  at  first.     He  did 


THE  VOICE  FROM  THE  STREET  163 

not  say  it  for  himself,  but  the  other  half-timers  said  it 
for  him:  he  was  the  "lad  as  owned  Hepplestall's,"  and  if 
there  was  any  dirty  work  going,  the  owner  did  it,  nursing 
anger  against  his  family  and  coming  young  to  a  judicious 
opinion  of  their  pretensions. 

He  had  his  handicap  in  life,  but  soon  gave  proof  that 
if  he  was  a  Bradshaw  it  was  an  accident  which  other  peo- 
ple would  be  wise  to  forget,  fighting  his  way  from  the 
status  of  a  butt  till  he  was  cock  of  the  walk  amongst  the 
half-timers.  There  is  much  to  be  said  for  a  wiry  physique 
as  the  basis  of  success,  but  Tom  shed  blood  and  bruised 
like  any  other  boy  and  the  incidents  of  his  battling  career 
amongst  the  half-timers  at  Hepplestall's  did  nothing  to 
disturb  that  first  lesson  of  his  life,  "  'A  'ate  th'  'epple- 
staUs." 

Hatred  is  a  motive,  like  any  other,  and  a  strong  one. 
It  resulted  in  Tom's  conceiving  the  ambition,  while  he  was 
a  "little  piecer,"  that  he  would  some  day  be  secretary  of 
the  Spinners'  Union  and  in  that  office  would  lead  labor 
against  the  Hepplestalls.  He  was  his  own  man  now,  liv- 
ing not  at  home  but  in  lodgings,  hardily  keeping  himself 
on  the  wages  of  a  "little  piecer"  of  eighteen,  reading  the 
Clarion,  and  presently  startling  a  Sunday  School  debat- 
ing society  with  the  assertion  that  he  read  Marx  and 
Engels  in  the  original.  It  was  not  long  after  that  as- 
tonishing revelation  of  his  secret  studies  that  he  became 
unofficial  assistant  to  the  local  secretary  of  the  spinners, 
and  might  regard  himself  as  launched  on  a  career  which 
was  to  take  him  in  1906  to  the  House  of  Commons. 

An  election  incident  accounted  chiefly  for  Sir  Philip's 
good  opinion  of  Tom  Bradshaw.  Tom  might  forget  the 
legend,  but  the  legend  could  not  forget  a  candidate,  and 
it  was  thrown  into  the  cockpit  by  some  zealous  supporter 
who  imagined  that  Tom  would  ride  that  romantic  horse 
and  win  in  a  canter.     Tom  thought  otherwise;  a  story 


164  HEPPLESTALL'S 

obscurely  propagated  amongst  Staithley's  tender-hearted 
Samaritans  was  one  thing,  emerging  into  the  fierce  light 
which  beats  upon  a  candidate  it  was  another.  He  was 
out  to  win  on  the  merits  of  his  case,  not  by  means  of  a 
sentimental  appeal  which,  anyhow,  might  be  a  boomerang 
if  the  other  side  took  the  matter  up  with  the  concurrence 
of  the  Hepplestalls. 

But  it  was  not  that  afterthought,  it  was  purely  his 
resolution  that  the  issues  should  not  be  confused,  that  took 
him  straight  to  Sir  Philip.  Sir  Philip  looked  a  question 
at  him. 

"It  might  be  Union  business,"  said  Tom,  "but  it  isn't. 
It's  the  election  and  I'm  here,  which  is  the  other  camp,  to 
make  you  an  appeal.  There's  a  thing  being  said  in 
Staithley  that  touches  you  and  me.  I  haven't  said  it,  but 
it  was  said  by  folk  that  thought  they  spoke  on  my  behalf. 
You'll  have  heard  tell  of  it?" 

"I've  heard,"  said  Sir  Philip. 

"Well,"  said  Tom,  "there's  always  a  lot  of  rubbish  shot 
at  elections,  but  the  less  the  better.  Will  you  help  me 
to  get  rid  of  this  particular  load  of  rubbish.'*  Will  you 
help  me  to  tell  the  truth?" 

"Is  there  question  of  the  truth?" 

"Not  in  my  mind.  But  in  theirs,  there  is.  They  be- 
lieved wliat  they  said  of  j'ou  and  me."  And  he  went  on  to 
tell  Sir  Philip  of  the  belief  of  the  Bradshaws  and  of  its 
acceptance  by  others.  "You  can  put  it  that  it's  never 
been  an  easy  thing  for  me  to  be  a  Bradshaw  in  Staithley. 
We're  known  as  the  Begging  Bradshaws  and  it's  been  a 
load  I've  had  to  carry  that  I'm  one  of  them  by  birth. 
They've  begged  on  the  strength  of  this  story.  But  it's 
only  hurt  me  up  to  now.  It's  going  to  hurt  others  to-day, 
it's  going  to  hurt  my  cause  and  I'm  here  not  to  apologize 
for  folks  that  have  done  no  more  than  said  what  they  be- 


THE  VOICE  FROM  THE  STREET         165 

lieve:  I'm  here  to  ask  if  you  will  join  with  me  in  publish- 
ing the  truth." 

"Shall  I  tell  you  the  only  fact  known  to  me  which  may 
have  bearing  on  your  family's  belief,  Mr.  Bradshaw?" 

"I  wish  you  would.  That  there's  a  fact  of  any  sort  be- 
hind it  is  news  to  me." 

"A  man  called  Bradshaw  was  hanged  for  the  murder  of 
an  ancestress  of  mine.  It  is  possible  you  are  descended 
from  this  man." 

"By  gum!"  said  Tom.  "That's  an  ugly  factor.  I 
didn't  know  I  was  in  for  one  like  that  when  I  came  here 
asking  you  to  help  me  with  the  truth.  Well,  we'll  publish 
it.  It'll  not  help  me,  but  I'm  for  the  truth  whether  it's 
for  me  or  against  me." 

Sir  Philip  crossed  the  room  to  him.  **Shake  hands,  Mr. 
Bradshaw,"  he  said.  "We'll  tell  the  truth  in  this  to- 
gether, but  at  the  moment  we've  not  gone  very  far.  Your 
opinion  of  your  family  in  general  makes  you  rather  too 
ready  to  believe  that  they  are  in  fact  the  descendants  of 
this  murderer." 

"Thank  you.  Sir  Philip,"  said  Tom.  "But  I'm  not 
doubting  it." 

**What  we  can  do,  at  any  rate,  is  to  go  together  through 
the  records  of  the  firm.  Or  I  will  employ  some  one  who  is 
accustomed  to  research  and  we  will  issue  his  report.  My 
cupboard  may  have  a  skeleton  in  it,  but  it  is  open  to  you 
to  investigate." 

Tom  Bradshaw  sweated  hard.  "It's  making  a  moun- 
tain out  of  a  mole  hill,"  he  said.  He  had  never,  since  the 
half-timers  taught  him  commonsense,  had  anything  but 
contempt  for  the  legend  of  the  Bradshaws ;  at  every  stage 
of  his  upward  path  it  had  embarrassed  him,  but  never  had 
he  felt  before  to-day  that  it  pursued  him  with  such 
poisonous  malignity.     He  had  no  hope  that  any  point 


166  HEPPLESTALL'S 

favoring  the  Bradshaws  would  emerge  from  an  examina- 
tion of  the  records ;  it  would  be  a  fair  examination  of  dis- 
passionate title  deeds  and  its  fairness  would  be  the  more 
damaging.  And  he  had  pleaded  for  the  truth,  he  had  put 
this  rapier  into  his  political  opponents'  hands!  The 
Labor  candidate  was  the  descendant  of  a  murderer ! 

*'Thank  you  again,"  he  said. 

*'0h,  as  to  that,"  said  Sir  Philip,  "the  existence  of  this 
belief  interests  me.  If  our  searcher  finds  any  grounds  for 
it  here  or  in  parish  registers  or  elsewhere,  I  shall  of  course 
acknowledge  them.  But  the  odds  are  that  the  legend 
springs  from  a  perverted  view  of  the  murder  of  which  I 
have  told  you,  and  if  that  is  so,  I  fear  the  disclosure  will 
hardly  profit  you." 

"It  won't,"  said  Tom  gloomily.  "But  it'll  shut  their 
silly  mouths."  If,  he  reflected,  it  did  not  open  them  in 
full  cry  on  a  new  and  odious  scent. 

"So  we  go  on  with  it?" 

'We  go  on." 

'May  I  say  this,  Mr.  Bradshaw?  That  your  attitude 
to  this  affair  increases  an  admiration  of  3'ou  which  was 
considerable  before?  If  you  beat  us  in  this  election  we 
shall  have  the  satisfaction  of  knowing  that  we  are  beaten 
by  a  man."  Which  was  handsome,  seeing  that  there  was 
the  stuff  of  libel  in  the  statements  of  Tom's  well-meaning 
supporter.  Amenities,  but  Tom  did  not  doubt  their  sin- 
cerity, and  his  sentiment  of  personal  hatred,  already 
weakened  by  contact  with  the  Hepplestalls  in  his  Union 
affairs,  merged  into  his  general  and  tolerantly  profes- 
sional opposition  to  capitalists. 

In  the  event,  what  was  issued  was  a  statement  simply 
denying,  on  the  authority  of  a  historian,  of  Sir  Philip 
and  of  Tom,  that  the  claim  made  by  the  Bradshaw  family, 
and  repeated  during  the  election,  had  any  foundation 
whatsoever,  and  whether  the  denial  had  effect  or  not,  it 


«7 


THE  VOICE  FROM  THE  STREET         167 

cannot  have  made  much  difference  to  Tom's  candidature. 
He  had  a  clear  two  thousand  majority  over  both  Liberal 
and  Unionist  opponents,  and  had  held  the  seat  ever  since, 
while  the  legend  of  the  Bradshaws,  like  any  lie  that  gets  a 
long  start  of  the  truth,  flourished  as  impudently  as  ever. 
In  Bradshaw  opinion,  Tom  Bradshaw  had  been  bought, 
and  they  found  fresh  evidence  for  this  view  whenever 
Tom's  matured  attitude  toward  the  Masters'  Federation 
earned  for  him  the  disapproval  of  extremists.  They  did 
not  cease  to  teach  their  children  that  if  every  one  had 
their  own,  Hepplestall's  was  Bradshaws'.  "A  gang  of 
wastrels,"  Sir  Philip  had  called  them  to  Rupert,  and  could 
have  quoted  chapter  and  verse  for  his  opinion.  As  he 
read  the  history  dredged  by  his  searcher,  the  Bradshaws 
began  with  John,  a  murderer,  and  ended  in  a  family  of 
beggars ;  but  he  excepted  Tom.  When  the  Union  spoke 
to  him  through  Tom,  there  was  no  bitterness  between 
them;  there  was  a  meeting  on  equal  terms  between  two 
men  who  respected  each  other.  Sir  Philip  recalled  the 
Bradshaws  as  they  figured  in  his  historian's  report,  and 
he  recalled  the  Hepplestalls.  "Dying  fires,"  he  thought; 
Tom  Bradshaw  was  eminently  the  reasonable  negotiator. 

Walter  Pate  crashed  out  the  final  chords. 

"Aye,"  said  Tom,  "aye.  A  grand  lad,  Wagner.  And 
when  I  hear  you  play  him,  it's  a  comfort  to  know  I  can 
wipe  the  floor  with  you  at  chess."  Which  Mr.  Pate  ac- 
cepted as  a  merited  salute  to  a  brilliant  performance,  and 
unscrewed  the  stopper  from  a  bottle  of  beer.  A  moment 
later  Tom  stared  at  his  friend  in  blank  amazement ;  he  was 
staggered  to  see  Pate  raise  the  glass  to  his  lips  and  put  it 
down  again. 

"Man,  are  you  ill?"  he  cried.  The  beer  foamed  assur- 
ingly,  but,  to  be  on  the  safe  side,  Tom  tasted  it.  "The 
beer's  fine,  what's  to  do?" 

"Shut  up,  you  slave  to  alcohol.      Shut  up  and  listen." 


168  HEPPLESTALL'S 

Walter  opened  the  window,  the  cold  night  air  blew  in  and 
with  it  came  from  the  street  the  strains  of  "Lead  Kindly 
Light,"  sung  in  a  fresh  girlish  voice. 

Fires  are  fires  in  Staithley,  as  Tom  was  in  the  habit  of 
telling  Londoners  who  put  coal  by  the  dainty  shovelful 
into  a  doll's  house  grate,  and  if  he  was  commanded  to  shut 
up  he  could  do  it,  but  the  open  window  was  a  persecution. 
There  was  a  silent  pantomime  of  two  elderly  gentlemen 
one  of  whom  struggled  to  close  a  window,  the  other  to  keep 
it  open,  then  Tom  turned  to  the  defeated  Walter  with  a 
*'What  the  hangment's  come  over  you.'"' 

"Have  you  no  soul  at  all,  Tom.'*  Couldn't  you  hear 
her.?" 

"I  heard  a  street-singer." 

*'You  heard  a  class  voice,  and  you're  going  to  hear  it 
again."     Mr.  Pate  was  at  the  window. 

"Then  bring  her  in,"  said  Tom.  "I'll  freeze  for  no  fad 
of  yours.     A  class  voice  in  Staithley  streets !" 

"A  capacity  to  play  chess  is  a  limiting  thing,"  was  fired 
at  him  as  Mr.  Pate  left  the  room.  Tom  took  an  amicable 
revenge  by  emptying  both  glasses  of  beer.  "I've  cubic 
capacity,  choose  how,"  he  said,  indicating  their  emptiness 
as  Walter  returned  with  the  girl  who  had  been  singing. 

"Get  warm,"  said  Walter  to  her.  "Then  we'll  have  a 
look  at  you." 

She  had,  clearly,  the  habit  of  taking  things  as  they 
came,  and  went  to  the  fire  with  as  little  outward  emotion 
as  she  had  shown  when  Walter  pounced  upon  her  in  the 
street.  She  accepted  warmth,  this  strange,  queerly  luxuri- 
ous room,  these  two  men  in  it,  as  she  would  have  accepted 
the  blow  which  Walter's  upraised  hand  and  voice  had 
seemed  to  presage  in  the  street — with  a  fatalism  full  of 
pitiable  implications. 

She  was  of  any  age,  beyond  first  childhood,  that  went 
with  flat-chested  immaturity ;  she  was  dirty  beyond  reason, 


THE  VOICE  FROM  THE  STREET         169 

but  she  had  beauty  that  shone  through  her  gamin  dis- 
order like  the  moon  through  storm-tossed  cloud.  Her 
tangled  hair  was  dark  auburn,  her  eyes  were  hazel  and  as 
the  fire's  heat  soaked  into  her  a  warm  flush  spread  over 
her  pinched  face  like  sunshine  after  rain  on  ripening  com. 

"Can  you  sing  anything  besides  'Lead  Kindly  Light.'"  " 
asked  Walter. 

"Of  course  she  can't,"  said  Tom.  "It's  the  whole  of 
the  beggar's  opera."  He  was  sore  about  that  opened 
window  and  resented  this  girl  who  had  disturbed  a  musical 
evening.  He  had  appetite  for  more  than  the  "Meister- 
singer,"  and  seemed  likely,  through  the  intruder,  to  go  un- 
satisfied. 

She  looked  pertly  at  Tom.  "  'A  can,  then,"  she  said. 
*'Lots  more,  but,"  her  eyes  strayed  round  the  room,  "  'a 
dunno  as  you'd  fancy  'em." 

"Go  on,"  said  Walter.  "There'll  be  supper  after- 
wards." 

"Crikey,"  she  said,  and  sang  till  he  stopped  her,  which 
was  very  soon.  They  had  a  taste  in  the  meaner  public- 
houses  of  Staithley  for  the  sort  of  song  which  it  is  libelous 
to  term  Rabelaisian.  Her  song,  if  she  did  not  know  the 
meaning  of  its  words,  was  a  violent  assault  upon  decency ; 
if  she  did  know — and  her  hesitation  had  suggested  that  she 
did — it  was  precocious  outrage. 

"Stop  it,"  cried  Walter,  horrified. 

Tom  spat  into  the  fire.  "My  constituents  !'*  he 
groaned.     "Walter,  it's  a  queasy  thought." 

*'I  thought  you  favored  education,"  said  Walter. 

"I  do,  but—" 

*'Go  on  favoring  it.     It's  a  growing  child." 

"Thanks,"  said  Tom  gratefully.  "You're  right.  This 
is  foul-tasting  tonic,  but  it's  good  to  be  reminded  how 
far  we  haven't  traveled  yet." 

Walter's  hand  strayed  gently  to  his  friend's  shoulder. 


170  HEPPLESTALL'S 

*'Short  fights  aren*t  interesting,"  he  said,  and  turned  to 
the  girl,  whose  patient  aloofness  through  this  little  con- 
versation, so  unintelligible  to  her,  was,  again,  revealing. 

"Go  back  to  the  hymn,"  he  said. 

**A  hymn .?"     The  word  had  no  meaning  for  her. 

"  *Lead  Kindly  Light,'  "  he  explained. 

**0h,  that,"  she  said,  and  sang  it  through  without  inter- 
ruption. It  was  street  singing,  adapted  to  penetrate 
through  the  closed  windows  of  Staithley  and  by  sheer 
shrillness  to  wring  the  withers  of  the  charitable.  Tom 
Bradshaw,  amateur  of  music,  found  nothing  in  this  insis- 
tent volume  of  song  to  account  for  Walter  Pate's  inter- 
est; she  made,  tunefully,  a  great  noise  in  a  little  room,  and 
he  wished  that  Walter  would  stop  her,  though  not  for  the 
same  reason  as  before.  But  Walter  did  not  stop  her,  he 
listened  and  he  watched  with  acute  absorption  and  when 
she  had  finished,  "again,"  he  said,  gesturing  Tom  back 
into  his  chair  with  a  menacing  fist. 

*'It  goes  through  me  like  a  dentist's  file  in  a  hollow 
tooth,"  Tom  protested. 

"You  fool,"  said  Mr.  Pate  pityingly,  and,  to  the  girl, 
"Sing." 

*'Now,"  he  said  when  she  had  ended,  "I  don't  say  art. 
Art's  the  unguessable.  I  say  voice  and  I  say  lungs.  I 
say  my  name's  Walter  Pate  and  I  know.  Give  me  two 
years  on  her  and  you'll  know  too.  If  you'd  like  me  to 
tell  you  who'll  sing  soprano  when  the  Choral  Society  do 
the  *Messiah'  at  Christmas  of  next  year,  it's  that  girl." 

*"Oo  are  you  gettin'  at?"  she  asked. 

"I'm  getting  at  you,  getting  at  you  with  the  best  voice- 
producing  system  in  the  North  of  England — Walter 
Pate's.  And  when  I've  finished  with  you,  you'll  be — well, 
you  won't  be  singing  in  the  street.'* 

"Well,  I  can't  see  it,  Walter,"  said  Tom. 

"You've  the  wrong  letters  after  your  name  to  see  it," 


THE  VOICE  FROM  THE  STREET         171 

said  Walter,  "but  I've  made  a  find  to-night,  and  I'm  gam- 
bling two  years'  hard  work  on  the  find's  being  something 
that  will  make  the  musical  world  sit  up.  Buy  a  cheap 
brooch  and  it's  tin  washed  with  gold.  That  voice  is  the 
other  way  round.  It's  tin  on  top  and  gold  beneath  and 
I'm  going  digging  for  the  gold."  Not,  he  might  have 
added,  because  gold  has  value  in  the  market.  If  Walter 
Pate  had  discovered  a  voice  which,  under  training,  was 
to  become  the  pride  of  Staithley,  that  was  all  he  wanted; 
he  wouldn't  hide  under  a  bushel  his  light  as  the  discoverer 
and  the  instructor,  but  all  he  wanted  else  was  proof  in  sup- 
port of  his  often  expressed  opinion  that  musically  Staith- 
ley led  Lancashire  (the  rest  of  the  world  didn't  matter) 
and  he  thought  he  had  found  his  proof  in — he  turned  to 
the  girl.     "You  haven't  told  us  your  name,"  he  said. 

"Mary  Ellen  Bradshaw,"  she  told  him,  and  "Lord!" 
said  Tom.     "You'll  waste  your  time." 

"I  shan't,"  said  Walter.  "There's  grit  amongst  that 
tribe.     You're  here  to  prove  it." 

"Where  do  you  live?"  Tom  asked  her. 

"Brick-yards,  mostly,"  she  said.  "I'm  good  at  dodg- 
ing bobbies."  There  is  warm  sleeping  by  the  kilns,  and 
the  police  know  it. 

"Got  any  parents,  Mary  Ellen?" 

"  'A  dunno.  They  was  there  last  time  'A  went  to 
Jackman's  Buildings.  There  weren't  no  baggin'  there,  so 
'a  'opped  it.     That's  a  long  time  sin'." 

"This  gentleman  is  called  Bradshaw,"  said  Walter,  to 
Tom's  annoyance. 

"Is  'e?  she  said.  « 'A  'ate  th'  'epplestalls."  It  might 
have  been  a  pass-word,  and  Tom  thought  she  had  the  in- 
tention, in  speaking  it,  to  curry  favor  with  a  rich  rela- 
tion, but  as  it  happened  Mary  Ellen  was  sincere.  She  did 
not  say  she  hated  the  Hepplestalls  to  please  Tom  Brad- 
shaw.    She  said  it  because  it  was  true. 


172  HEPPLESTALL'S 

Tom  certainly  wasn't  pleased.  He  reached  for  his  hat. 
*'I*m  off  out  of  this,"  he  s^aid,  and  when  Walter  looked  at 
him  with  surprise,  "Man,"  he  said,  "it's  beyond  all  to  find 
that  old  ghost  jibbering  at  me  when  I've  sweated  blood  to 
lay  it.  You  do  not  hate  the  Hepplestalls,"  he  roared  at 
Mary  Ellen.     "They're  decent  folk  and  you're  mud." 

"Aye,"  she  said  submissively.  That  she  was  mud,  at 
any  rate,  was  not  news  to  her. 

"Aye,  what.?" 

"What  yo'  said." 

"Come,"  said  Walter.     "There's  tractability." 

**I  call  it  cunning.  Beggar's  cunning.  She's  a  Brad- 
shaw." 

"Not  to  me.  She's  a  Voice,  and,  by  the  Lord,  I'll  train 
her  how  to  use  it." 

"What  are  you  going  to  do,  Walter?"  Tom  put  his 
hat  down,  feeling  that  it  was  ungenerous  to  leave  his  friend 
in  the  grip  of  a  mistaken  impulse. 

"Steal  her.  Well,  no.  That's  not  to  do;  it's  done. 
She's  here.  Mary  Ellen,  you're  going  to  sleep  in  a  bed 
to-night,  with  sheets  and  a  striped  quilt  on  it  like  you  see 
in  the  windows  of  the  Co-op." 

"Oo — er,"  said  Mary  Ellen. 

*'But,"  said  Walter,  "you're  going  to  be  washed  first. 
The  water  won't  be  cold.  It'll  be  warm,  and  it'll  be  in  a 
bath.     You've  heard  of  baths?" 

She  nodded.  "Aye,"  she  said,  "you  'ave  'em  when  you 
go  to  quod." 

Tom  turned  suddenly  away  and  when  he  looked  round 
there  were  marks  of  suffering  on  his  face.  "I've  been 
living  too  soft,  Walter,"  he  said.     "I've  been  forgetting." 

"No,"  said  Walter,  "your  whole  life  is  remembering. 
Education,  Tom.     Isn't  that  the  sovereign  remedy?" 

"I'm  believing  in  nothing  just  now,"  said  Tom  Brad- 
shaw. 


THE  VOICE  FROM  THE  STREET         173 


ur 


«1 
til 


'Then  I  am.     I'm  believing  in  the  voice  of  Marj  Ellen 
and  I'm  going  to  educate  it." 

'Will  it  'urt?"  asked  Mary  Ellen. 

'No,'*  said  Tom,  "but  I  will  if  you're  not  grateful  to 
Mr.  Pate.     I'll  break  your  neck." 

"Tom,  Tom !"  protested  Walter. 

"Eh,  lad,"  said  Tom,  "I've  got  the  heartache  for  the 
waif,  but  you're  aiming  to  sink  two  years'  good  work  in 
her,  and  she  a  Bradshaw.  Man,  they're  the  Devil's  Own. 
They'll  take  and  take  amd — do  you  fancy  this  is  like  me, 
Walter.''  Me  arguing  against  one  of  the  downs  being 
given  a  chance  to  get  up !  But  when  it's  you  that's  giving 
the  chance  and  a  Bradshaw  that's,  to  take  it  I've  a  sinking 
feeling  that  the  risk's  too  big.  They'll  bite  the  hand 
that  feeds  them,  they'll—" 

"Well,  I'll  be  bitten  then.  There  are  times  when  I 
doubt  if  you've  a  proper  sense  of  the  place  of  music  in  the 
world  and  I  tell  you,  this  is  one  of  them.  If  I'm  vouch- 
safed the  chance  of  giving  that  voice  to  mankind,  I  can 
do  without  having  her  gratitude  thrown  in.  I'm  doing 
this  to  please  myself,  my  lad,  and  for  the  honor  and  the 
glory  of  Staitliley  Bridge.  If  she  goes  on  to  where  I'm 
seeing  her,  she'll  wipe  her  boots  on  me  in  any  case, 
but  she'll  not  wipe  out  the  fame  of  Staithley  that  bred 
her." 

"She  was  bred  in  Jackman's  Buildings.  The  beastliest 
slum  in  the  town." 

"They'll  go  pilgrimages  to  her  birthjJlace." 

"You  don't  believe  that.  Music's  as  bad  as  drink  for 
damaging  a  man's  sense  of  proportion." 

Mary  Ellen  fidgeted,  not  with  the  distress  which  may 
be  supposed  to  assail  a  sensitive  child  who  is  discussed  be- 
fore her  face,  but  because  the  conversation  missed  her  main 
point.     "When's  supper?"  s'he  asked. 

"After  your  bath,"  said  Walter,  defying  Tom  with  hi» 


174  HEPPLESTALL'S 

eyes.     Tom  took  up  his  hat  again.     "I'm  off,"  he  said. 
"I*ve  never  found  the  cure  for  fools." 

"All  right,"  said  Walter.  "In  two  years'  time,  you'll 
be  the  fool.  I'm  going  bail  for  that  Voice,  and  it's  neither 
here  nor  there  that  the  Voice  goes  with  a  Bradshaw." 

"Good  night,"  said  Tom,  and  went. 

Mary  Ellen  "pulled  bacon"  at  the  door  he  closed  be- 
hind him.  "  'A  'ate  th'  'epplestalls,"  she  said  cheekily, 
but  her  impudence  fell  from  her  as  he  returned.  She 
thought  he  had  heard  her  and  had  come  to  inflict  punish- 
ment. 

But  Tom  had  not  heard.  "Walter,"  he  said,  "if  you 
value  my  friendship,  there's  a  thing  you'll  not  deny  me." 

"Well?" 

"I  pay  half.     Let's  be  fools  together." 

Walter  sucked  meditatively  at  an  empty  pipe.  "Aye," 
he  said,  "we're  both  bachelors  and,"  holding  out  the  hand 
of  partnership,  "I'm  generous  by  nature,  Tom.  Tell 
Mrs.  Butterworth  I  want  her  as  you  go  downstairs. 


j> 


CHAPTER  III 

MAEY   ELLEN 

MARY  ELLEN  heard  with  trepidation  that  there  was 
a  Mrs.  Butterworth  on  the  premises;  she  was  old 
enough  to  know  that  it  was  one  thing  to  "get  round"  two 
men,  and  another  to  cozen  a  woman. 

Her  cozening  had  not  been  much  more  culpable  than 
that  of  any  one  who  sees  a  chance  and  determines  not 
to  fritter  it  away  by  understatement.  It  was  not  quite 
true,  it  was  a  propagandist  gloss  upon  the  truth,  to  say 
that  she  slept  out  on  the  brickfields,  implying  that  she 
was  homeless  when  she  had  sleeping  rights  in  the  fourth 
part  of  a  bed  in  Jackman's  Buildings.  But  there  had 
been  no  dissembling,  no  thought  to  please  Tom  Bradshaw, 
when  she  said  she  hated  the  Hepplestalls.  She  hated 
them  because  she  hated  the  misery  in  which  she  lived  and 
because  they  were  the  cause  of  her  living  in  misery.  That 
was  her  implicit  belief  and  the  guile  had  not  been  in  stat- 
ing it  but  in  denying  it  when  Tom  commanded  her  denial. 

The  guile  had  succeeded,  too.     Tom  Bradshaw  was  not 

a  strong  man  of  his  faction  without  knowing  that  there 

is  a  cant  of  the  underdog  as  of  the  upper,  and  he  had 

suspected  her  of  "beggar's  cunning."     Then  she  had  won 

him  round;  he  had  remembered  that  she  was  of  his  clan, 

he  had  felt  that  there,  but  for  the  grace  of  God  and  the 

difference  of  age  and  sex,  went  Tom  Bradshaw,  and  he 

had  gone  partners  with  Walter  in  her  future. 

She  had  conquered  males,  but  she  feared  Mrs.  Butter- 

175 


176  HEPPLESTALL'S 

worth  and  drew  closer  to  the  fire  lest  the  woman  should 
detect  her  as  not  so  unsophisticated  as  she  seemed  nor  so 
young  as  she  looked. 

She  did  not  know  Mrs.  Butterworth  nor  the  strength  of 
Mrs.  Butterworth's  affection  for  Walter.  Mrs.  Butter- 
worth  was,  in  nominal  office,  his  housekeeper ;  actually  she 
was  slave,  without  knowing  she  was  slave,  to  a  man  who 
did  not  know  he  had  enslaved  her.  Stoically  she  took 
whatever  came  from  Walter,  and  things  like  lost  kittens 
and  broken-legged  puppies  came  habitually.  This  time, 
making  unprecedently  a  call  upon  her  tolerance,  a  girl 
came  and  Mrs.  Butterworth  might  have  been  provoked 
into  defining  the  duties  of  a  housekeeper  to  a  bachelor. 
Instead,  she  listened  to  instructions,  put  on  an  overall, 
got  out  her  disinfectants  and  prepared  to  clean  Mary 
Ellen  and  to  bum  her  clothes  with  a  placid  competence 
which  asserted  that  she  was  not  to  be  overcome  by  any 
freak  of  Walter's,  no  matter  how  eccentric. 

"If  she's  to  go  into  the  spare  bed,"  she  said,  "she'll 
go  clean." 

No  need  to  dwell  on  happenings  in  the  bathroom;  they 
were  there  for  a  long  time,  and  when  Mary  Ellen  came 
out,  wrapped  in  a  night-dress  of  Mrs.  Buttenvorth's,  she 
felt  raw  from  head  to  foot.  But  she  had  two  satisfac- 
tions which  sent  her  very  happily  to  sleep  in  spite  of  her 
rawness.  One  was  bread  and  milk  in  quantity,  the  other 
was  the  assurance  she  derived  from  the  looking-glass  that 
if  her  parents  saw  her,  they  would  not  recognize  her.  Her 
voice  had  been  an  asset  to  her  parents  who  had  been  there- 
fore not  so  indifferent  to  the  existence  of  their  Mary  Ellen 
as  her  story  had  suggested. 

Mrs,  Butterworth  returned  to  the  sitting  room.  *'She'f 
in  bed,"  she  reported. 

"Thank  you,"  said  Walter  and  then,  by  way  of  explana- 
tion, added,  "She  can  sing." 


MARY  ELLEN  177 

"I  thought  it  would  be  that,"  she  said. 

"Yes,  yes,  it  is  quite  extraordinarily  that.  Did  I  make 
it  clear  to  you  that  she  will  live  here?" 

"I'll  keep  her  clean,"  said  Mrs.  Butterworth,  shoulder- 
ing the  burden. 

"And  she  had  better  be  described  as  my  niece,  from,  let 
us  say,  Oldham.  You  will  buy  her  clothes  to-morrow. 
Her  name  is  Mary.     We  will  call  her  Mary  Pate." 

"It's  a  good  name  to  take  risks  with,"  she  warned  him. 

"Wait  till  I've  taught  her  how  to  sing." 

"Oh,  aye,"  she  said,  with  seeming  skepticism;  but  she 
was  not  skeptical.  She  accepted  Mary,  she  believed  in 
her  because  Walter  believed  in  her  and  because  his  belief 
was  so  strong  that  he  bestowed  on  her  the  name  of  Pate. 
That  settled,  for  Mrs.  Butterworth,  that  Mary  was  re- 
markable. 

Walter  himself  was  doubtful  if  he  was  justified  in  shar- 
ing his  name  with  her.  It  was  an  honored  name  in  Staith- 
ley,  but  when  Mary  Ellen  soared  she  would  cast  luster  on 
the  name  she  bore,  and  he  questioned  if  he  were  not  high- 
handedly appropriating  that  luster  to  his  name.  But  on 
other  grounds,  of  convenience,  of  propriety  (a  singing 
master  had  to  be  circumspect),  of  cover  from  the  possible 
quest  of  bereft  parents,  he  decided  she  had  better  be  Pate. 

Why,  it  Italianized  into  Patti !  He  hadn't  thought  of 
that  before,  but  it  seemed  a  good  omen  and  before  he  went 
to  bed  that  night  he  had  planned  in  full  his  scheme  for 
the  education  of  a  pupil  who  did  not  merely  come  to  him 
for  lessons  while  spending  the  rest  of  her  time  out  of  his 
control,  but  of  one  who  from  her  uprising  to  her  retiring 
should  be  ordered  by  him  to  the  single  end  that  she  should 
be  a  great  singer. 

No  one  but  a  bachelor,  and  a  Mrs.  Butterworth-spoiled 
bachelor  at  that,  would  have  imagined  that  a  system  so 
drastic,  and  so  monastic,  would  prove  workable,  but  at 


178  HEPPLESTALL'S 

first  Mar  J  Ellen  was  docile.  She  had  gone  without  crea- 
ture comforts  for  too  long  not  to  appreciate  them  when 
she  had  them,  and  she  was  docile  through  her  fear  of  los- 
ing them,  of  being  sent  back  to  Jackman's  Buildings  or  of 
being  dragged  back  by  her  parents.  Their  beat,  cer- 
tainly, was  not  her  beat  now,  and  the  almost  suburban 
street  in  which  she  had  been  singing  when  Walter  heard 
her  was  well  away  from  the  Staithley  Beggar's  Mile.  But 
there  were  always  off-chances  (such  as  her  own  coming 
there),  and  perhaps  she  knew  or  perhaps  she  did  not  know 
that  she  was  one  of  those  people  who  can  be  seen  across  a 
wide  road  by  the  short-sighted :  a  quality  she  had  of  which 
there  is  no  particular  explanation  except  that  it  is  one 
of  the  Almight3''s  conjuring  tricks,  performed  for  the 
ugly  as  compensation  for  their  ugliness  and  for  the  beau- 
tiful because  to  them  that  hath  shall  be  given. 

At  any  rate,  so  long  as  she  feared  the  clutch  of  her 
past  she  subdued  her  rebelliousness  to  the  discipline  of 
study,  and  all  too  soon  he  was  treating  her  companionably, 
he  was  letting  her  into  the  secret  of  the  ambition  he  had 
for  her,  he  was  assuming  that  because  he  knew  the  neces- 
sity of  a  long,  arduous  training,  she  would  reasonably 
submit  to  it. 

But  her  submissiveness  to  his  regimen  passed  with  the 
passing  of  her  fears.  She  trusted  the  disguise  of  clothes, 
of  the  manner  she  acquired  and  of  speech,  which  was  no 
longer  that  of  Jackman's  Buildings,  to  confound  the  Brad- 
shaws  even  if  she  met  them  face  to  face  and  as  confidence 
grew  her  motive  for  acquiescence  in  much  that  his  system 
implied  was  weakened.  It  implied,  especially,  the  secret- 
ing of  her  talent  until  he  deemed  it  ripe  for  exhibition,  and 
Mary  Ellen  grew  impatient. 

Perhaps  he  had  not  clearly  stated  his  ambition  or  per- 
haps she  had  not  clearly  understood,  but  while  he  ex- 
pected her  to  be  a  pupil  long  after  her  Staithley  days 


MARY  ELLEN  179 

were  past,  she  was  not  looking  beyond  Staithley,  she  was 
not  seeing  why  work  should  be  continuous  now  that  it 
had  ceased  to  be  a  new  sensation.  She  was  avid  of  re- 
sults and  grew  sullen  at  her  labor  which  seemed  to  lead  no- 
where but  to  more  labor. 

He  consulted  Mrs.  Butterworth:  was  Mary  Ellen  ill.-* 

"111.''  She's  got  horse-strength,  but  you  can  over- 
drive a  horse.     All  work  and  no  play  is  good  for  nobody." 

'She  goes  to  concerts,"  he  protested. 

'That's  part  of  her  work,  and  part  of  her  trouble, 
too.  Going  and  hearing  others  sing  and  you  telling  her 
to  watch  them  and  to  learn  what  to  avoid,  and  she  fancy- 
ing she's  better  than  they  are,  an'  all." 

"She  is  better." 

"Then  it  doesn't  help  her  to  know  it  and  to  know  they 
sing  in  public  and  she  doesn't." 

"She  shan't  sing  yet.     What  am  I  to  do.?'* 

*'Take  her  mind  off  it.  It's  always  concerts.  There 
are  theaters." 

There  were.  There  was  one  in  Staithley  (there  was 
even,  depth  below  the  deep,  a  music-hall),  but  the  feeling 
existed  that  if  playgoing  was  done  at  all  it  should  be 
done  furtively  and  though  Walter  would  not  have  dreamed 
of  putting  music  and  drama  in  two  categories  the  one 
labeled  respectable  and  the  other  disreputable,  he  had  to 
defer  to  the  prejudices  of  those  who  did.  He  lived  by 
teaching  music  and  singing  to  the  offspring  of  Staithley's 
upper  ten,  and  there  might  be  tolerance  amongst  them, 
but  he  had  to  be  on  the  safe  side  and  to  take  the  view  that 
the  theater  was  a  detrimental  place.  This  was  self-pro- 
tective habit  which  recently  had  crystallized  into  some- 
thing approaching  conviction  through  the  action  of  one 
Chown.  The  crime  of  Mr.  Chown,  and  to  Walter  it  was 
no  less  than  crime,  was  to  translate  the  Staithley  Hand 
Bell   Ringers   to   the   music-halls,   where   they   had  made 


180  HEPPLESTALL'S 

much  money  b}'  (Walter  held)  debasing  their  musical 
standards.  But  the  music-hall  was  not  the  theater  and 
he  had  to  admit,  on  reflection,  that  there  was  really  no 
connection  between  Mr.  Chown's  vulgarization  of  the  mus- 
ical taste  of  the  Staithlcy  Hand  Bell  Ringers  and  Mary 
Ellen's  going  to  the  play.  There  was  Shakespeare  and 
if  it  was  prudent  for  him  not  to  go  with  her  himself,  there 
was  Mrs.  Butterworth,  who  stood  awaiting  his  decision 
with  a  notable  and  not  disinterested  anxiety. 

It  was  not  disinterested  because  the  slave  had  her  relax- 
ation, her  weekly  "night  out"  when  she  threw  the  shackles 
off  and  forgot  in  the  pit  of  the  Theater  Royal  that  she 
was  housekeeper,  valet,  nurse  and  mother  to  Walter  Pate. 
Not  his  to  ask  nor  his  to  tell  what  delicious  freedom  she 
found  in  those  emancipated  hours,  but  hers  the  hope  to 
add  to  tlicm  when  she  cunningly  prescribed  the  theater  as 
a  cure  for  Mary  Ellen's  restivcness. 

"Would  you  go  with  her?"  he  asked  shyly,  his  tone  im- 
plying that  now,  if  never  before,  he  was  her  petitioner. 

"If  you  wish  it,"  she  said,  exulting  secretly.  "I'm 
sure  she  needs  a  change." 

So,  Shakespeare  conveniently  arriving  at  Staithley  in 
the  hands  of  a  troupe  of  actors  of  heroic  good  intentions, 
Mary  Ellen  went  to  fairyland  with  Mrs.  Butterworth  who 
proved,  however,  when  she  had  grown  used  to  sitting  on 
a  plush  chair  in  the  circle  instead  of  on  a  hard  bench  in  the 
pit,  an  unromantic  guide.  Mary  was  lost  with  Rosalind 
in  Ardcn  and  Mrs.  Butterworth  took  advantage  of  the 
interval  to  parade  her  knowledge  of  the  private  concerns 
of  the  actors.  It  was,  for  the  most  part,  a  recital  of 
the  sycophantic  slush  handed  by  the  advance  agent  to 
the  office  of  the  SiaithUy  Erwning  Reporter,  and  printed 
«ach  Friday  unedited.  She  knew  how  Jacques  and  Phoebe, 
though  they  only  met  when  this  tour  began,  had  been 


MARY   KLLEN  181 

rriarriffj  last,  wf-r.k  at.  Hufldf.'r8fif]fJ,  ai»d  what  difficuJties 
ha/J  U*<.'n  ovf-rcoinf-  to  »ecure  lega)  rnarria^*:  for  a  pair  of 
Ktrollin/^  players  who  only  stayed  ni  a  town  for  a  wefrk. 
And  she  kn«'w  where  Rosalind  lodgr.'d  in  Staithley.  Mary 
did  not  find  this  disenchanting:  for  her  it  linke<J  fairyland 
with  Staithley.  Rosalind  was  not  a  (ir<h.j{i,  mysterious, 
impalpably  detached  from  life,  >/ut  a  real  woman  lodf^ng 
in  a  street  which  Mary  Pollen  knew:  she  walke-<J  the  pave- 
ments in  skirts  when  she  wasn't  ruffling  it  in  doublet  and 
hose,  fx.'witcliing  young  Orlando  in  a  glamorous  wood,  and 
if  Rosalind  why  not,  some  magical  day,  Mary  Ellen?  She 
gasped  at  her  audacity,  at  the  egregious  fantasy  of  leap- 
ing thought.  Slie  was  earth-bound  by  StaitWey,  and 
these  were  the  fetterless  imaginings  of  a  freer  world. 

She  couldn't  and  she  didn't  look  beyond  StaitUey,  and 
the  stage  seemed  something  so  remotely  beyond  her  reach 
that  she  hid  her  thought,  even  from  herself.      She  had  the 
trick,  when  chocolate  came  her  way,  of  g^.-tting  on  a  chair 
and  of  putting  the  packet  on  the  top  of  her  wardrobe, 
hoarding  it  not  too  long  but  long  enough  to  make  her  feel 
nobly    conscious    of    severe    self-restraint.      So    with    this 
thought  of  the  stage:  she  put  it,  wrapp'-d  in  silver  paper, 
at  the  top  of  her  mental  wardrolx-,  not  wholly  inaccessible, 
but  difficult  of  access,  not  forgotten  but  put  where  it  was 
not  easy  to  rememPxr  it.      But  it  had   all   the  same  its 
reactions  and  the  chief   of   these  operated  in   a  manner 
precisely    contrary   to    Walter's    intentions    when   he    al- 
lowed lier  to  go  to  the  play.      "She  shan't  sing  yet,"  Cin 
public,  that  is)    he  had   said   decidedly   to   Mr.**.   Butter- 
worth,  and  Mary  Ellen,  if  slie  admitted  doublet  and  hose  to 
be,  for  her,  the  fabric  of  a  dream,  was  spurred  by  that  im- 
possible to  demand  her  possible,  to  demand  her  right  to 
wear  an  evening  dress  and  in  it  to  appear  upon  a  plat- 
form and  to  sing  in  public. 


182  HEPPLESTALL'S 


j> 


"Not  yet,"  he  said.     "Not  for  a  long  while  yet.' 

"Oh,  Daddy  Pate,  I  can't  wait  for  ever." 

"Nobody's  asking  you  to.  But  you'll  wait  till  you're 
ready." 

"How  long?" 

"Some  time.     Years." 

"Years?  But  you  told  Mr.  Bradshaw  I  was  to  sing  in 
the  'Messiah.'     I've  been  learning  it." 

"You  heard  that?  That  night  you  came?  Well,  it 
was  a  foolish  boast  of  mine.  You  practiced  it  as  you  have 
practiced  otlicr  things,  for  the  groundwork  on  which 
you'll  build." 

"You  mean  I'm  not  good  enough.  Then  why  have  you 
told  me  I'm  good?" 

"You're  too  good  to  spoil." 

"But  I'm  spoiling  now. 

"No :  you're  learning.' 

She  cried  piteously  and  when,  surprisingly,  that  did  not 
move  him,  she  sulked  and  refused  to  eat  and  managed  to 
make  herself  so  unwell  that  work  was  out  of  the  question 
and  Mrs.  Butterworth  was  guilty  of  disloyalty  to  Walter. 

"She'll  fret  herself  into  a  decline,"  she  said.  "You'd 
best  give  way  to  her." 

"She'll  damage  her  voice  if  this  goes  on,"  he  had  to 
admit.  "Can't  you  talk  sense  to  her?"  and  Mrs.  Butter- 
worth,  swinging  back  to  her  allegiance,  promised  she 
would  try,  but  her  talking  was  to  ears  that  were  deaf. 
Mary  Ellen,  appealed  to  in  the  name  of  gratitude  she  owed 
Walter,  was  stubbornly  unmoved.  "I  was  better  off  in 
the  streets,"  she  said.     "I  sang.     People  heard  me." 

Mrs.  Butterworth  held  up  her  hands  in  scandalized  pro- 
test.    "Oh,  dearie!"  she  said,  incapable  of  more. 

"Why  am  I  kept  down  like  this  ?"  demanded  Mary  Ellen. 

"Mr.  Pate  knows  best." 

*'He  knows  he's  got  me  in  prison.     He  thinks  he  can 


MARY  ELLEN  183 

amuse  himself  by  trying  his  experiments  on  me.  His  per- 
fect system  that  has  never  been  tried  before !  No,  because 
nobody  would  stand  it,  so  he  picked  me  off  the  street  to 
have  me  to  try  it  on  because  he  thought  I  was  helpless. 
He  doesn't  care  about  me.  I'm  not  a  girl.  I'm  not  hu- 
man flesh  and  blood.  I'm  a  thing  with  a  voice  that  he's 
testing  a  system  on,  and  he  thinks  I'll  let  him  go  on  test- 
ing till  he's  tired  of  it.  Years,  he  said.  Years  in  a 
prison !  Years,  while  he  bribes  me  to  stand  it  by  making 
lying  promises — " 

*'0h !  he  never !"  said  Mrs.  Butterworth,  stung  to  defend 
Walter,  though  secretly  in  S3'mpathy  with  much  of  her 
passionate  distortion  of  his  motives. 

"He  did!  He  said  I  was  to  sing  solo  in  the  *Messiah' 
and  now  he  says  I  shan't.  He  isn't  tired  of  his  experi- 
ments yet." 

"I'm  sure  he  means  it  for  your  good." 

"Yes.  Father's  licked  me  saying  that  and  loving  ^ 
I'm  being  kept  down  for  his  pleasure  and  I'm  tired  if  he 
isn't.     I'm  going  back  to  the  streets." 

"That's  foolish  talk,  Mary." 

"I'm  going  to  sing  somewhere.  That  may  be  foolish, 
but  it's  fact." 

"Well,  I'll  tell  him.     Now  eat  your  breakfast.'* 

"No,"  said  Mary  Ellen,  hunger-striker,  and  Mrs.  But- 
terworth reported  a  total  failure  in  guarded  misquotation 
of  the  rebel.  "I  can  put  bacon  before  her,  but  I  cannot 
make  her  eat.  And  she'll  run  away.  She  will,  as  sure  as 
eggs  are  eggs,  and  you'll  lose  her  then.  We  can't  lock 
her  up." 

"No."  Walter  mused  upon  the  authority  of  a  foster- 
father,  clamping  his  anger  down,  recognizing  the  weakness 
of  his  position.  He  was  not  her  guardian;  he  had  no 
reason  to  suppose  that  her  parents  were  alive  or  that 
any  one  had  better  right  than  he  had  to  command  her, 


184  HEPPLESTALL'S 

but  he  had  assumed  possession  of  Mary  Ellen  as  if  she 
were  a  kitten  and  a  girl  was  not  a  kitten.  He  could  only 
rule  by  the  consent  of  the  ruled,  and  he  thought  he  had 
earned  her  consent.  He  had  given  her  so  much — even, 
treating  her  as  of  discreet  age,  his  confidence — and  he  had 
thought  she  had  responded,  he  had  thought  she  had  reason- 
ably understood  what  he  was  doing  and  why.  But  if  she 
put  it  that  he  was  simply  a  tyrant,  there  was  nothing  to 
do  but  to  humor  her  till,  in  time,  she  saw  indisputably 
that  he  was  right.  To  let  her  go,  to  lose  what  had  been 
so  well  begun,  was  unthinkable. 

Mrs.  Butterworth,  sensitive  to  Walter's  suffering,  broke 
in  upon  his  thoughts.  "I'd  like  to  whip  the  thankless 
brat,"  she  said  viciously,  and  if  she  was  hinting  at  a  policy 
it  might  have  been  a  sound  one.  But  Walter  was  not 
thinking  whether  Mary  Ellen  was  or  was  not  still  of  whip- 
pable  age,  he  was  going  back,  whimsically,  to  his  begin- 
nings with  her,  he  was  thinking  how  he  had  said  to  Tom, 
"If  she  goes  on  to  where  I'm  seeing  her,  she'll  wipe  her 
boots  on  me."  The  boot-wiping  had  begun  before  he 
looked  for  it;  that  was  all  except  that  it  was  his  lystem 
on  which  she  wiped  her  boots,  his  system  off  which  she 
rubbed  the  bloom. 

He  went  to  Mary,  still  staring  at  her  uneaten  meal, 
with  a  compromise.  "I  think  you  might  sing  this  season 
with  the  Choral  Society,  Mary,"  he  said,  "attending  their 
practices  and  appearing  in  public  when  they  appear." 

"Daddy  Pate,"  she  said,  "I  didn't  mean  to  be  a  nuisance, 
but  I  had  to  make  you  see  it.  The  Choral  Society?  That 
means  just  in  the  chorus." 

"Well,  for  this  season,  Mary." 
"But  the  'Messiah'?     You  promised  me." 
*'0h,  hardly.     But  we  shall  see,  Mary.     We  shall  see." 
And  knowing  that  she  had  got  him,  so  to  speak,  with  his 


MARY  ELLEN  185 

foot  on  the  butter-side,  she  kissed  him  very  sweetlj  and 
then,  to  show  him  what  a  practical,  commonsensical  per- 
son she  really  was,  she  sat  down  to  breakfast.  "And  I 
don't  mind,"  she  said,  "if  the  bacon  is  cold,"  and  ate, 
magnanimously. 


CHAPTER  IV 


ME.    CHOWN   OF   LONDON 


THE  best  that  could  be  said  about  the  Wheatsheaf 
Hotel  at  Staithley  Bridge  was  very  good  indeed;  it 
was  that  when  a  certain  eminent  actor-manager  was  ap- 
pearing in  Manchester,  he  put  up  at  the  Wheatsheaf  in 
Staithley  and  motored  in  and  out.  It  is  thirty  miles  each 
way,  there  is  a  Midland  Hotel  in  Manchester,  and  actor- 
managers  know  all  there  is  to  know  about  personal  com- 
fort.    That  places  the  Wheatsheaf. 

It  was  Staithley's  sporting  hotel,  and  golf  club-houses, 
not  to  mention  the  habit  of  golfers  of  motoring  to  their 
sport,  have  dispelled  the  illusion  that  sportsmen  are  a 
hardy  race.  The  ^Vheatsheaf  had  its  crowded  hour  when 
the  visiting  teams  of  professional  footballers  who  came  to 
oppose  Staithley  Rovers  arrived  in  a  charabanc,  and  at- 
tracted customers,  who  paid  reckless  prices  for  drinks  in 
a  place  where  they  could  get  near  views  of  authentic 
heroes :  but  for  the  most  part,  solid,  quiet  comfort  was  the 
keynote  of  the  Wlieatsheaf  and  commercial  travelers  knew 
it. 

Those  of  them  who  were  not  victims  of  the  falling  status 

of  the  traveler,  and  the  too  closely  scrutinized  expense 

accounts,  went  to  the  Wheatsheaf ;  the  others  envied  them 

and  went  where  they  could  afford  to  go.     The  uninstruc- 

ted  Londoner  would  have  passed  it  by  without  a  second 

glance;  the  Wheatsheaf  did  not  advertise.     It  was  inno- 

186 


MR.  CHOWN  OF  LONDON  187 

cent  of  gilt,  and  its  whisky  was  unwatered.  It  was  a  \ery 
good  hotel. 

Nevertheless,  Mr,  Alastair  Montagu,  who  always  stayed 
there  when  his  company  was  at  the  Theater  Royal,  was 
surprised  to  see  Lexley  Chown  in  the  smoking  room  of 
the  Wheatsheaf.  He  remembered  the  eminent  actor-man- 
ager, and  his  surprise  was  not  that  Chown,  being  in  Staith- 
ley,  should  have  the  discrimination  to  stay  at  the  Wheat- 
sheaf, but  that  Chown  should  be  in  Staithley.  Chown 
was  a  figure  in  the  profession,  but  emphatically  a  Lon- 
don figure. 

The  business  of  Mr.  Chown  was  that  of  an  "artiste's 
agent."  A  middleman  trading  in  human  flesh  and  blood? 
Perhaps ;  but  Chown  was  a  useful  clearing-house.  He 
was  an  impressive  person,  floridly  handsome,  beautifully 
dressed,  and  the  routine  work  which  kept  him  and  the 
expensively  rented,  exquisitely  furnished  suite  of  offices 
near  Leicester  Square  was  something  like  this.  A  man- 
ager would  ring  up  and  say  that  by  to-morrow  he  must 
have  a  snub-nosed  actor,  six  feet  tall,  with  red  hair  and  a 
cockney  accent  to  play  a  part  worth  seven  pounds  a  week. 
Mr.  Chown,  or  Mr.  Chown's  secretary,  consulted  the  card 
index  and,  by  its  means,  collected  half  a  dozen  unemployed 
actors  who  answered,  roughly,  to  the  manager's  specifica- 
tion, and  sent  them  to  see  the  manager,  who  might  choose 
one  of  them  but  more  probably  would  not.  He  would 
probably  ring  up  and  say,  "I  say,  Chown,  I've  looked 
over  this  bunch.  Not  one  of  them  a  bit  like  it."  Chown 
would  reply,  truthfully,  that  each  of  his  applicants  had  a 
snub  nose,  red  hair,  was  six  feet  high  and  a  cockney  who 
was  prepared  to  act  for  seven  pounds  a  week,  and  that 
these  were  the  qualifications  the  manager  had  demanded. 
The  manager  would  not  deny  it,  but  "I  had  a  brain-wave 
last  night.  Billy  Wren  is  the  man  I  want  for  that  part. 
He  was  born  to  play  it,  only,"  pathetically,  "I  don't  know 


188  HEPPLESTALL'S 

where  he  Is."  "I  do,"  Mr.  Chown  would  say  calmly. 
"He's  in  'The  Poppy  Plant,'  which  is  at  Eastbourne  this 
week  and  at  Torquay  next  week."  "Get  him  out  of  that 
for  me,  old  man,"  "I'll  try,  but  Billy  is  five  feet  six,  his 
hair  is  black  and  he's  got  a  Roman  nose."  "I  don't  care : 
I  want  him."  "And  his  salary  is  sixteen."  "Who 
cares?"  Billy  would  be  wired  for,  cajoled  into  giving  up 
the  certainty  of  his  tour  for  the  uncertainty  of  a  London 
run,  his  touring  manager  would  be  placated  with  a  sub- 
stitute at  half  Billy's  salary,  and  the  London  Manager 
would  pa}-^  Mr.  Chown  precisely  nothing  for  these  services. 
Did  Mr.  Chown,  then,  help  lame  dogs  over  stiles  for  noth- 
ing.'' Not  at  all:  he  received  ten  per  cent  of  the  actor's 
salary  for  the  first  ten  weeks  of  a  run,  from  the  actor. 
His  brains  and  liis  system  were  at  the  service  of  the  man- 
ager, but  it  was  the  actor  who  paid  all  while  receiving 
certainly  not  more  than  the  manager  who  paid  nothing, 
not  even  compliments  to  Mr.  Chown  on  the  astonishing 
efficiency  of  that  compilation  of  many  years,  his  card 
index. 

That  was  the  bread  and  butter  work  of  Mr.  Lexley 
Chown,  but  his  portly  form  was  not  nourished  on  Lenten 
fare,  nor  was  his  wine  bill  paid  out  of  his  card  index.  He 
was  an  industrious  seeker  after  talent  buried  in  the  Eng- 
li  ih  provinces ;  he  had  the  flair — not  the  nose,  for,  re- 
markably, Mr.  Chown  was  not  a  Jew — for  discovering 
young  people  of  merit  whose  market  value,  under  intelli- 
gent handling,  would  in  a  few  years  be  in  the  neighborhood 
of  a  hundred  pounds  a  week.  It  is  a  profitable  thing  to 
be  sole  agent  of  a  number  of  people  each  earning  a  hun- 
dred pounds  a  week. 

When  business  was  good — and  Staitliley  was  a  good 
"No.  2"  town — Mr.  Alastair  Montagu  was  capable  of  be- 
lieving what  his  posters  asked  the  public  to  believe  about 
the  merits  of  his  company,  but  in  his  most  optimistic,  his 


MR.  CHOWN  OF  LONDON  189 

most  characteristically  showmanlike  mood,  he  could  not 
persuade  himself  that  Lexley  Chown  had  come  from  Lon- 
don to  Staitliley  looking  for  stars  of  the  future  amongst 
the  sprightly  old  women  and  elderly  young  men  of  "The 
Woman  Who  Paid"  company.  There  was  old  Tom  Hall, 
of  course,  a  sound  actor  who  ought  to  be  in  London,  but 
Chown  knew  all  about  Tom,  and  about  Tom's  trouble, 
too.  Whisky  drinkers  on  Tom's  scale  weren't  Chown's 
quarry,  nor,  indeed,  he  reflected,  were  sound  actors  either. 
To  be  a  "sound  actor"  is  to  be  damned  with  faint  praise 
and  a  mediocre  salary.  No:  Chown  must  be  after  some- 
thing at  the  music-hall,  and  Montagu  had  "popped  in" 
the  other  evening  without  seeing  anything  extraordinary. 
But  that  was  just  it,  with  Chown.  There  was  nothing 
extraordinary  about  the  people  he  discovered  until  after 
he  discovered  them ;  then  every  one  saw  how  extraordinary 
they  were. 

Chown,  shaking  Montagu's  hand  and  bending  over  it 
with  an  inclination  of  the  body  which  seemed  derived  from 
Paris  rather  than  London,  was  merely  Chown  not  dif- 
ferentiating between  this  unimportant  touring  manager 
and  the  great  ones  of  the  earth  who  paid  high  salaries  to 
established  reputations.  But  Mr.  Montagu  was  flattered, 
he  had  a  fine  capacity  for  flattery. 

My  dear  Montagu,  I'm  delighted,"  said  Mr.  Chown. 
You  will  honor  me  by  dining  with  me.''  They  have  a 
Chablis  here  that  really  is  not  unworthy  of  your  accep- 
tance." 

It  was  flattering  to  be  thought  a  connoisseur  of  wine, 
and  Chown  had  skillfully  mentioned  a  wine  that  couldn't 
go  beyond  Montagu's  savoir  vivre,  instead  of  the  more 
esoteric  drinks  of  his  own  preferring.  Yet  Mr.  Chown, 
taking  trouble  to  secure  a  guest,  wanted  nothing  of  Mon- 
tagu but  his  company.  The  theater  is  at  once  convivial 
and  self-insulating.     Chown  hated  solitude,  and  though 


190  HEPPLESTALL'S 

there  were  hail-fellow-well-met  commercial  travelers  in  the 
hotel  whose  conversation  would  have  been  a  tonic,  he  pre- 
ferred the  limited  Mr.  Montagu.  Erroneously,  Mr. 
Chown  despised  commercial  travelers. 

Mr.  Montagu,  in  gratitude,  decided  to  give  Mr.  Chown 
a  hint.     Mr.  Chown  was  in  evening  dress. 

"I  am  glad  to  hear,"  said  Mr.  Chown,  who  had  heard 
nothing  at  all,  "that  you  are  having  excellent  houses." 

The  houses  were  no  better  than  Montagu's  inexpensive 
company  deserved.  "I  am  not,"  he  confessed,  "doing 
musical  comedy  business.  Still,  they  have  a  feeling 
for  the  legitimate  here.  Staithley's  a  good  town, 
if,"  he  added,  trying  to  give  his  kindly  hint,  "it  isn't 
dressy." 

"No.  I  suppose  one  mustn't  judge  these  people  by 
their  clothes.  They  don't  put  their  money  on  their  backs 
in  the  North.  They've  more  left  to  spend  on  the  theater, 
Montagu.'* 

"And  the  music-hall.'* 

*'Ah !     You  feel  the  competition  ?" 

"I  wasn't  meaning  that.  Look  here,  Chown,  are  you 
coming  in  to  see  my  show  to-night?" 

"Well — "  Mr.  Chown's  whole  anatomy,  as  seen  above 
the  table,  was  apology  incarnate. 

"No.  You're  not.  I  didn't  think  it  and  that's  why  I 
didn't  ask  at  once.  It's  some  one  at  the  Palace  you've 
come  to  see,  isn't  it?" 

*'WTiat  makes  you  think  so?" 

"Well,  there's  nothing  else  in  Staithley."  The  theater 
is  self-insulating.  "And  you  haven't  come  here  for  your 
health.  But,  if  you'll  excuse  my  saying  it,  they  don't 
dress  for  the  theater,  let  alone  the  Palace,  and  if  you  go 
there  as  you  are,  they'll  throw  things  at  you  from  the 
gallery." 

"Montagu,  I  shan't  forget  this  kindness,"  said  Chown. 


MR.  CHOWN  OF  LONDON  191 

"You  put  me  under  obligation  to  jou.  But — did  you 
never  hear  of  an  Eisteddfod?" 

"Is  it  a  new  act  on  the  halls?"  asked  Mr.  Montagu,  who 
did  not  rapidly  clear  his  mind  of  an  obsession. 

Mr.  Chown  smiled.  "Not  yet,"  he  said,  but  "out  of  the 
mouths  of  babes  and  sucklings,"  he  thought,  mentally  fil- 
ing an  idea  for  future  reference. 

"Wait  a  moment,"  said  Mr.  Montagu.  *'Why  am  I 
thinking  of  Lloyd  George?" 

"Because  of  a  natural  association  of  ideas.  Staithley 
Eisteddfod,  however,  is  a  Lancashire  occasion  with  a 
Welsh  label  that  hasn't  much  to  do  with  it.  You  may  re- 
call the  Hand  Bell  Ringers  who  were  on  the  halls  some 
years  ago.  I  picked  them  up  at  Staithley  Eisteddfod. 
It's  a  sort  of  competitive  festival  of  song,  and  if  I  were  not 
dressed,  I  should  net  be  admitted  to  the  stalls." 

Staithley  was,  so  to  speak,  on  Montagu's  beat,  and  it 
was  not  on,  obviously,  Chown's.  Yet  here  was  Chown  tell- 
ing Montagu  something  about  Staithley  quite  material 
to  his  business,  which  he  did  not  know.  Staithley  Eis- 
teddfod did  not  advertise :  the  largest  hall  in  the  town  was 
too  small  to  hold  the  friends  of  the  competitors,  let  alone 
the  hardly  more  dispassionate  public,  and  ChoAvn  had  his 
ticket  for  the  stalls  because  he  was  a  subscriber  to  the 
funds.  Short  of  theft,  it  was  the  only  way  by  which 
one  could  become  possessed  of  a  ticket. 

He  did  not  add,  though  he  knew,  that  Montagu's 
second-rate  company  with  their  third-rate  play  was  at 
the  Staithley  Theater  Royal  that  week  because  more  alert 
managers,  with  better  attractions,  steered  clear  of  the 
place  in  that  week  of  musical  ferment,  and  the  resident 
theater  manager  had  to  take  what  he  could,  by  diplomatic 
silence,  g^t.  One  lives  and  learns  and  Mr.  Montagu 
would  learn  that  week  without  a  living  wage ;  his  moderate 
houses  belonged  with  the  early,  pre-Eisteddfod  nights  of 


192  HEPFLESTALL'S 

the  ^reei  and  though  only  the  favored  fevr  would  crowd 
into  the  Eistc-ddfod  Hall,  the  rest  of  StaitUey,  hot  par- 
tisans of  the  performers,  watched  and  waited- 

Music  is  music  in  Lancashire. 

"Ah,'"  said  the  innocent  Mr,  Montagu,  "if  it's  music. 
and  dressed  at  that,  it'll  not  affect  me  at  the  theater." 

"Let  me  fill  your  glass.'-  said  Mr.  Chown.  "What's 
your  opinion  of  the  cinemas  .*" 

Mr.  Montagu  was  of  the  opinion,  current  in  1912.  that 
the  cinemas  were  of  no  account.  Revolutions  in  the  mak- 
ing are  apt  to  go  unperceived  by  their  contemporaries. 
Chown  wjis  less  insular,  but  "Imagine,*'  he  said,  '*the 
strangled  emotions  of  the  young  man  in  the  stalls  who 
desires  a  woman  he  sees  on  the  cinema  and  then  realizes 
she  is  a  shadow  on  a  screen."  They  finished  dinner  on 
a  genially  Rabelaisian  note. 

Chown  chose  this,  the  first  evening  of  the  Eisteddfod, 
because  there  were  to  be  no  Hand  Bell  Ringers  and  no 
instrumentalists:  there  was  choral  singing  and  there  were 
soloists.  He  was  going  to  hear  Choral  Societies  from  all 
over  Lancashire  sing,  one  after  the  other,  the  same  chorus 
from  "King  Olaf,"  and  he  was  going  to  hear  soloists,  one 
after  the  other,  sing  the  same  song.  It  was,  on  the  face 
of  it,  the  dullest  possible  way  of  spending  an  evening,  yet 
the  packed  audience  in  Staithley  Drill  Hall  considered 
themselves  privileged  to  be  there.  The  official  judges  who 
were  Walter  Pate  and  two  others  (which  meant,  for  prac- 
tical purposes.  Walter  Pate  alone)  sat  screened  off  from 
view  of  the  performers,  lest  prejudice  should  mar  tlie  fair- 
ness of  their  decisions.     They  heard  but  did  not  see. 

The  audience  heard  and  saw.  and  the  singers  were  not 
numbers  to  them  but  "our  Annie"  or  "our  Sam"  or  "our 
lot  fra'  Blackburn"  and  so  on.  Local  feeling  ran  high 
under  an  affectation  of  cool  discrimination  and  broke  out 
in  wild  applause,  intended  to  influence  the  judges'  verdict, 


MR.  CHOWN  OF  LONDON  193 

coming,  curiously  localized,  from  parts  of  the  hall  where 
adherents  had  gathered  together  in  the  belief  that  union 
is  strength.  But  they  were,  one  and  all,  susceptible  to 
fine  shades  of  singing;  they  didn't  withhold  applause  from 
a  fine  rendering  because  the  singers  were  of  some  other 
district  than  their  ovm.  Local  patriotism  was  disciplined 
to  their  musical  appreciations. 

Mr.  Chown,  of  London,  had  ceased,  as  an  annual  visi- 
tor, to  be  surprised  by  this  musical  cockpit,  where  not 
money  but  taintless  glory  was  the  prize.  They  competed 
for  the  honor  of  their  birthplaces,  and  for  the  privilege 
of  holding  a  "challenge  shield,"  inscribed  with  the  ■nnnners' 
names,  until  the  next  contest.  He  had  ceased  even  to  won- 
der at  that  drastic  rule  of  an  autocratic  committee  im- 
posing evening  dress  upon  the  occupants  of  the  front  seats 
and  at  its  phenomenal  results.  He  was  a  worker  in  re- 
search, he  was  scientifically  unemotional  about  the  mo- 
tive of  his  research,  but  he  was  on  fertile  ground  here,  and 
if  he  drew  blank  at  Staithley  Eisteddfod,  then  Lancashire 
was  not  the  county  he  took  it  for. 

Yet  his  was  not  the  point  of  %ncw  of  Mr.  Pate,  and  the 
capacity  to  sing  was  the  least  of  the  qualities  for  which 
he  looked.  To  a  sufficing  extent,  the  capacity  would  be 
present  in  all  of  to-night's  competitors,  even  in  those  who 
sang  only  in  chorus,  and  what  Mr.  Cho\\Ti  was  looking  for 
was  best  indicated  by  the  algebraic  symbol,  X.  He 
couldn't,  himself,  have  defined  the  quality  he  sought.  The 
reflection  of  Mr.  Montagu  about  the  actor  Tom  Hall  may 
be  recalled.  Tom  Hall  was  a  sound  actor,  lacking  X. 
If  there  is  a  word  for  X,  it  is  personality.  Good  looks 
went  for  something,  and  so  did  the  evident  possession  of 
either  sex  but  the  whole  of  X  depended  neither  upon  good 
looks  nor  upon  sex,  and  was  a  mystery  of  the  stars  whom 
Mr.  Chown,  with  his  trustworthy  flair,  discovered  before 
they  were  stars.     Technique  could  be  acquired,  and  Mr. 


194  HEPPLESTALL'S 

Chown  did  not  condemn  technique,  but  X  was  and  it  was 
not  possible  to  acquire  it.  Add  X  to  technique  and  the 
result  was  a  hundred  pounds  a  week :  technique  without  X 
was  Tom  Hall,  "The  Woman  Who  Paid"  and  the  whiskj 
of  conscious  failure  in  life. 

He  sat  down  with  a  silent  prayer  that  an  X  performer 
would  appear  on  the  platform  and  that  he  might  not  re- 
peat his  poignant  disappointment  of  last  year  when  he 
had  found  an  unmistakable  X  only  to  learn  that  its  pos- 
sessor was  a  Wesleyan  who  looked  upon  a  theater  door 
as  the  main  entrance  to  hell.  "But  you're  a  great  artist," 
he  had  told  her  and  "I'm  a  Christian  woman,"  she  had  re- 
plied and  left  him  frustrate. 

His  program  informed  him  that  the  first  part  of  the 
evening  would  be  occupied  by  choral  singing,  and  he 
settled  himself  on  a  spartan  chair  to  await,  with  what 
patience  he  might,  the  turn  of  the  soloists.  There  were 
ten  choirs  on  the  program;  at  least  two  hours  of  it, 
he  reckoned,  but  Mr.  Chown  was  no  quitter  and  the  zeal 
of  the  conductors  and  the  rusticity  of  the  choirs'  clothing 
might  be  trusted  to  afford  him  some  amusement.  And  yet 
he  flagged;  the  monotony  was  drugging  him,  and  the 
Wheatsheaf  had  done  him  very  well.  .   .   . 

Had  he  slept?  That  was  the  question  he  asked  himself 
as  he  saw  the  girl.  Had  he  slept  through  the  choral  and 
perhaps  half  of  the  solo  singing?  He  sat  up  sharply, 
and,  as  he  did  so,  realized  that  a  full  choir  was  on  the 
platform.  But  his  first  impression  had  been  that  the 
girl  was  alone,  and,  even  now,  he  found  it  difficult  to  see 
that  there  were  thirty-nine  other  people  with  her. 

She  eclipsed  them.  *'She's  got  it,"  he  prevented  him- 
self with  difficulty  from  shouting  aloud — and  Mr.  Chown 
was  no  easy  prey  to  enthusiasm..  Still,  a  girl  who  could 
"wipe  out  thirty-nine  other  people,  who  could  glow  uniquely 
in  a  crowd !     "Put  her  on  a  stage,"  he  was  thinking,  **and 


MR.  CHOWN  OF  LOXDOx\  195 

they'll  feel  her  to  the  back  row  of  the  gallery."  He  noted 
as  additional  facts,  accidentals  but  fortifying,  that  she 
had  youth  and  good  looks.  He  tried,  honestly,  to  fix  his 
attention  on  a  large-headed  man  in  the  choir  who  had  a 
red  handkerchief  stuck  into  his  shirt-front,  and  a  made-up 
tie  that  had  wandered  below  his  ear.  The  fellow  was 
richly  droll,  but  it  was  no  use:  the  girl  drew  him  back 
to  her.  He  tried  again,  with  an  earnest  spinsterish  lady 
Tfho  looked  strong-minded  enough  for  anything:  and  the 
girl  had  him  in  the  fraction  of  a  minute.  "She'll  do,'* 
he  thought — "if  she  hasn't  got  religion,"  he  added  rue- 
fully. "Number  seven — Staithley  Bridge  Choral  So- 
ciety," he  read  on  his  program.  That  was  a  simplifica- 
tion, anyhow :  the  girl  must  live  in  Staithley. 

They  were  the  home  choir,  Staithley's  own,  and  the  ap- 
plause was  long,  detaining  them  in  embarrassed  acknowl- 
edgment on  a  platform  they  vehemently  wished  to  quit, 
but  Mr.  Chown,  making  for  the  pass-door  under  cover  of 
the  applause,  observed  that  there  was  no  embarrassment 
about  the  girl.  "Um,"  he  thought,  "no  nerves.  They're 
better  with  them.  Well,  one  can't  have  everything."  At 
the  pass-door,  a  steward  stood  sentinel,  "Press,"  said 
Mr.  Chown  with  aplomb,  using  an  infallible  talisman,  and 
the  sentinel  made  way  for  him. 

When  the  verdict  was  announced,  the  winning  choir  was 
to  appear  again  on  the  platform  to  sing  a  voluntary'  and 
to  receive  acclamations  and  the  challenge  shield.  Mean- 
while, the  whole  four  hundred  contestants  were  herded  to- 
gether in  the  Drill  Hall  cellarage  and  Mr.  Chown  added 
himself  inconspicuously  to  their  number.  Mistaken,  as  he 
hoped  to  be,  for  a  Staithleyite  just  come  off  the  platform, 
he  found  beer  pressed  fraternally  upon  him,  and,  heroi- 
cally, he  drank.  Self-immolation  and  research  are  tradi- 
tional companions.  He  felt  that  the  beer  had  made  him 
one  of  them,  but  could  not  withhold  a  backward  glance 


196  HEPPLESTALL'S 

at  the  vanity  of  West  End  tailoring.  When  he  had  said 
"Press"  to  the  steward  at  the  pass-door  he  had  wondered 
if  his  costly  cut  were  plausible  and  now  that  same  cut  was 
blandly  accepted  amongst  the  nondescript  swallowtails 
of  this  unconforming  mob.  But  he  welcomed  their  inap- 
preciation ;  he  wanted  to  make  the  girl's  acquaintance  first 
as  one  of  themselves. 

A  press  of  women  came  down  the  stairs  into  the  cellar 
and  Mary  Ellen  was  with  them  but  not  of  them.  They 
chattered  incessantly,  excitedly,  letting  taut  nerves  re- 
lax in  a  spate  of  shouted  words ;  she  was  silent,  unmoved 
by  the  ordeal  of  the  platform  and  the  applause,  nursing 
her  sulky,  secret  resentment  of  Walter  Pate  who  had  re- 
fused  to  let  her  compete  amongst  the  soloists.  Mr.  Pate 
was  guarding  his  treasure  against  premature  publicity; 
he  was  guarding  her,  specifically,  against  Mr.  Chown,  that 
annual  raider  who  had  so  damnably  ruined  the  Staithley 
Hand  Bell  Ringers  by  taking  them  to  the  music-halls ;  he 
hid  her  in  the  Choral  Society  and  he  underrated  Mr. 
Chown's  perceptiveness. 

She  had  taken  many  things  from  Walter  Pate — the 
good  food  which  had  so  unrecognizably  developed  her, 
with  the  physical  exercises  he  prescribed,  from  a  sexless 
child  into  a  woman  of  gracious  curves ;  the  good  educa- 
tion, the  good  musical  instruction ;  the  good  beginnings  of 
every  kind ;  and  in  return  she  gave  him  work.  He  was  al- 
most certain  of  her  now :  the  tin  was  gone  from  her  golden 
voice  and  when  he  let  his  hoarded  secret  loose  upon  the 
world  he  knew  that,  under  God,  he  would  be  making  a 
great  gift  to  the  concert-platform.  He  would  give  a 
glorious  voice,  perfectly  trained,  and  perhaps  more  than 
that.  But  the  more  was  still  only  "perhaps."  "Art," 
he  had  said,  "is  unguessable"  and  it  remained  unguessable. 
But,  "she's  not  awakened  yet,"  he  thought,  and  hoped  for 
a  time  when  her  voice  would  be  more  than  well-produced. 


MR.  CHOWN  OF  LONDON  197 

It  lacked  color,  warmth,  feeling,  but  she  was  young  and, 
meanwhile,  he  was  doing  his  possible.  It  was  the  hardest 
thing  to  keep  her  back  from  public  trial,  both  because 
of  the  girl  herself  and  because  of  Tom  Bradshaw,  who  was 
paying  half  her  costs  and  didn't  share  Walter's  faith. 
But  they  must  wait,  they  must  all  wait,  and  if  two  years 
were  not  long  enough  they  must  wait  longer. 

Mr.  Pate,  who  looked  upon  her  as  the  great  servant  he 
would  give  to  music,  was  screened  away  in  the  judges' 
box:  Mr.  Chown,  who  looked  upon  her  as  an  income, 
watched  Mary  Ellon  take  her  cloak  from  a  long  row 
hanging  on  the  wall  and  go  towards  the  stairs  she  had 
just  descended. 

Evidently,  she  was  for  a  breath  of  air  and  he  thought 
it  would  be  a  shrewd  air  on  his  bare  head,  but  the  oppor- 
tunity of  private  conversation  was  too  good  to  be  missed 
and  he  awaited  her  return  at  the  foot  of  the  stair, 

"Oh,  you  are  going  out?"  he  said.  "So'm  I.  It's  hot 
in  here."     Pie  modified  the  Gallicism  of  his  bow. 

"Yes,"  she  said,  consenting  to  his  escort.  She  knew, 
better  than  he  did,  that  the  sort  of  boisterous  crowd  which 
awaits  the  declaration  of  an  election  result  was  assembled 
round  the  Drill  Hall ;  it  would  be  convenient  to  have  this 
big  man  with  her  to  shoulder  a  way  through  it. 

Their  clothes  stamped  them  as  competitors  and  the 
crowd  gave  passage.  Evening  dress  was  licensed  in 
Staithley  that  night,  but  his  arm  was  agreeably  protective 
till  they  were  through  the  crush ;  then  he  withdrew  it. 

"I'm  glad  to  be  out  of  that,"  he  said. 

"There's  too  much  crowd  to-night,"  said  Mary  Ellen. 

"Ah,  you  feci  that,  do  you?" 

"Choral  singing !"  she  said,  with  immense  disgust. 

"Yes,  indeed.  It  does  make  one  feel  one  of  a  crowd. 
I've  often  wondered,  in  ni}'  own  case,  if  I  shouldn't  have 
done  better  to  have  gone  on  the  stage." 


198  HEPPLESTALL'S 

She  looked  him  over.  "Well,"  she  said,  "I  suppose 
you  weren't  always  fat.     It's  too  late  now." 

Mr.  Chown  swallowed  hard.  "Yes,  for  me,"  he  said. 
*'Not  for  you.  Would  you  care  to  go  on  the  stage  if  the 
chance  came.'"' 

"Would  a  duck  swim?" 

Ducks,  he  thought,  more  often  drowned  than  swam  on 
the  stage;  that  was  why  there  was  always  so  much  room 
at  the  top.     "It's  very  hard  work,"  he  said. 

*'I'm  not  afraid  of  work,"  she  said,  and  then  remem- 
bered her  grievance,  "if  I  can  see  it  leading  anywhere. 
Work  that  only  leads  to  singing  with  the  crowd  isn't 
funny." 

*'0h,  I  can  do  better  than  that  for  you." 

*'You  can?     You.?" 

*'If  you  will  work.  If,  for  instance,  you  will  get  rid  of 
your  Lancashire  accent." 

"Tha*  gornless  fule,"  she  said,  "if  tha'  doan't  kna'  th* 
differ  'atween  Lankyshccr  an'  t'other  A'll  show  thee. 
Me  got  an  accent?  Me  that's  worked  like  a  Fury  these 
last  two  years  to  lose  my  accent?  Let  me  tell  you  I've 
had  the  best  teachers  in  Staithley  and — " 

**Yes,"  he  interinipted.  "The  difference  is  amazing.  I 
realize  how  you  must  have  worked.  It  is  only  a  question 
now  of,  so  to  speak,  a  finishing  school.  The  best  teachers 
in  Staithley  are,  after  all,  Staitliley  teachers.  I  am  think- 
ing of  London  and  perhaps  not  so  much  of  conscious  work 
as  unconscious  imitation  of  the  speech  of  the  people  who 
are  around  you." 

"London !"  she  said.     "London !     T\Tio  are  you  ?" 

*'I'm  a  well-known  theatrical  agent,  and  I  became  well- 
known  by  making  the  right  people  famous.  You  are  one 
of  the  right  people,  but  there  is  work  before  you.  You 
can't  act  yet.  You  hare  it  all  to  learn,  acting,  danc- 
ing—" 


MR.  CHOWN  OF  LONDON  199 


"Not  all,"  she  said.     "I  can  sing." 
"In  a  Choral  Society,"  he  said. 


"You  go  and  ask  Walter  Pate,"  she  said,  professing  a 
faith  in  Walter's  judgment  which  might,  in  her  circum- 
stances, have  been  to  her  credit,  but  that  all  Staithley 
shared  that  faith. 

All  Staitlilej  and  Mr.  Chown  who  was  at  once  im- 
pressed by  her  giving  Walter  Pate  so  confidently  as  refer- 
ence for  her  abilities.  "Does  Mr.  Pate  believe  in  you.'*" 
he  asked. 

"Ask  him  yourself.  Ask  him  why  he  keeps  me  and 
teaches  me  and  when  he's  told  you  that,  ask  him  a  ques- 
tion for  me.  Ask  why  he  wouldn't  let  me  go  in  for  the 
solo  competition  to-night  when  he  says  I'm  to  sing  solo 
in  the  *Messiah'  at  Christmas,  and  if  you  get  the  answer 
to  that,  tell  me,  for  I  don't  know." 

Chown  thought  he  could  tell  her  without  asking,  and 
marked,  gladly,  her  bitterness.  If  Pate  was  training  this 
girl,  it  was  because  he  believed  in  her.  Pate  did  not  take 
all  who  came,  and  wasted  no  time  on  fools,  but  he  had  not 
let  her  sing  as  a  soloist  to-night,  though  she  was  to  sing 
"The  Messiah"  in  a  few  months.  "Why.-*  Because  to- 
night was  Chown's  night  for  being  in  Staithle}^  and  Pate 
was  afraid  of  Chown.  Pate  (the  dog)  had  found  some- 
thing in  this  girl  and  was  keeping  it  to  himself.  He  im- 
agined he  had  hidden  her  safely  in  that  choir,  did  he?  But 
old  Chown  had  the  flair,  Chown  had  spotted  the  girl's  pos- 
session of  something  Pate  did  not  know  her  to  possess. 
Pate  only  knew  she  had  a  voice :  Chown  knew  she  had  the 
stuff  in  her  that  stars  were  made  of.  Certainly  her  voice, 
a  Pate-approved,  Pate-produced  voice,  put  an  even  better 
complexion  on  the  matter  than  Chown  had  suspected ;  it 
meant  that  here  was  immediate,  and  not  merely  future,  ex- 
ploitability.  She  was  ripe  at  once  for  musical  comedy  on 
tour  and  when  she  had  shed  her  accent  and  picked  up  some 


200  HEPPLESTALL'S 

tricks  of  the  trade,  he  would  stun  London  with  her — if  he 
could  filch  her  from  the  wary  Mr.  Pate. 

He  did  not  think  of  it,  precisely,  as  filching,  because  his 
conscience  was  quite  clear  that  he,  being-  Chown,  could  do 
immensely  more  for  her  than  Pate.  Pate  would  be  think- 
ing of  the  salary  of  a  musical  comedy  star.  Pate  would 
do  her  positive  damage  by  over-training  her  up  to  some 
impossible  standard  ridiculously  above  the  big  public's 
head ;  and  the  big  public  was  the  only  public  that  counted. 
Mr.  Chown  saw  himself,  in  all  sincerity,  as  the  girl's  bene- 
factor, if  not  as  her  savior. 

A  word  of  hers  came  back  to  him  as  a  menace  to  his 
hopes.  "Did  I  understand  you  to  say  that  Mr.  Pate 
keeps  you.^" 

Mary  Ellen  nodded,  and  he  felt  he  had  struck  a  snag. 

"You  are  a  relative  of  his?" 

*'I'm  not  then.  If  you  want  to  know,  he  found  me  sing- 
ing in  the  streets." 

"And  was  this  long  ago?" 

*'Getting  on  for  two  years." 

Mr.  Chown  had  the  grace  to  feel  a  twinge :  she  was,  be- 
yond a  doubt.  Pate's  property.  But  he  recovered  bal- 
ance, telling  himself  ver^^  firmly  that  Pate  would  mismanage 
the  property;  that  life  was  a  battlefield  and  that  "Vae 
Victis"  was  its  motto ;  that  one  must  live  and  that  if 
Pate  had  taken  reasonable  precautions,  he  would  not  have 
exposed  the  girl  to  the  marauding  Mr.  Chown.  And, 
anyhow,  Pate  was  a  pro^nncial. 

He  asked  her  age,  and  "Twenty-one,"  she  said  brazenly, 
aware  of  the  trammels  of  minority.  He  guessed  her  eigh- 
teen at  most,  but  she  wasn't  impossibly  twenty-one  and 
he  had  his  reasons  for  believing  her. 

"You  couldn't  be  a  better  age,"  he  said.  "I  have  some 
doubt  as  to  what  Mr.  Pate  will  say  to  my  proposal  of  the 
stage  for  you." 


MR.  CHOWN  OF  LONDON  201 

"Are  you  going  to  tell  him  about  it?"  she  asked  in 
alarm. 

"I  will  tell  you,"  he  said,  "now.  If  you  come  with  me 
to-morrow  to  London,  you  can  begin  at  once  in  a  musical 
comedy  on  tour."  She  gave  a  gasp.  "Oh,"  he  said,  "you 
wish  to  hear  no  more.  You  are  anxious  to  return  to  the 
Drill  Hall.  You  are,  perhaps,  cold?"  He  was  very  cold, 
but  not  too  cold  to  play  his  fish. 

"Cold?  I  could  listen  all  night  to  this."  Mr.  Chown 
envied  her  the  undistinguished  cloak  she  wore:  per  ardua 
ad  astra. 

"Well,"  he  said,  "it  is  true  that  the  work  I  have  to  offer 
you  is  very  different  from  the  restrained,  the  almost  caged 
existence  you  have  been  enduring.  But  you  will  begin  in 
the  chorus.  You  have  stage  fright  to  get  over,  and  all 
the  green  sickness  of  a  raw  beginner.  My  friend  Hubert 
Rossiter" — even  Mary  Ellen  had  heard  of  Rossiter — "will 
take  you  and  I  shall  see  that  he  passes  you  on  from  com- 
pany to  company.  Soon  you  will  play  small  parts, 
and  then  leading  parts.  Possibly,  for  experience,  a 
pantomime  at  Christmas.  And  while  you  are  learn- 
ing your  business  in  this  way  you  will  be  paid  all  the 
time." 

"How  much?"  she  asked  promptly. 

"Exactly  what  you  are  worth,"  he  said.  "You  won't 
starve  and  I  call  your  attention  to  this  point.  I  act  as 
your  agent  and  I  take  a  ten  per  cent  commission  of  your 
salary.  That  is  all  I  take,  and  you  will  see  that  it  is  to 
my  interests  that  your  salary  shall  be  large.  If  I  did 
not  believe  that  your  salary  in  a  very  few  years  will  be 
considerable,  I  should  not  be  standing  bareheaded  and 
without  a  coat  in  a  Staithley  by-street.  The  train  to 
London  leaves  at  ten  in  the  morning.  Am  I  to  take  a 
ticket  for  you?" 

"Yes,"  she  said. 


202  HEPPLESTALL'S 

"It  is  a  curious  fact,"  he  remarked,  "that  I  do  not  know 
your  name.     Mine  is  Chown.     Lexley  Chown." 

"Mine's  Mary  Ellen  Bradshaw,"  she  said,  jettisoning 
the  name  of  Pate  as  useless  cargo  now. 

"Mary,"  he  mused.  "I  think  we'll  keep  the  Mary. 
But  we'll  improve  the  rest.  And  now  that  you  and  I  have 
settled  this  between  ourselves,  when  do  I  see  Mr.  Pate.'*" 

"He's  very  busy  to-night,"  said  Mary  Ellen,  "and  the 
train  leaves  early  to-morrow." 

Mr.  Chown  looked  hard  at  her,  and  she  met  his  eye  un- 
flinchingly. It  was  perfectly  understood  between  them 
that  Walter  Pate  was  a  ladder  by  which  she  had  reached 
a  secure  place.  Having  reached  it,  she  could  kick  the 
ladder  from  her,  and  "Well,"  thought  Mr.  Chown,  "she 
can  do  it  to  Pate,  but  I'm  forewarned."  He  turned  to  go 
back  to  the  Drill  Hall  expecting  her  to  follow.  She  did 
not  follow,  she  was  gazing  fixedly  up  the  street  in  which 
they  stood  and  when  he  returned,  a  trifle  ill-tempered  at 
being  kept  longer  than  need  be  in  the  chilling  air,  her  re- 
mark was  disconcerting. 

The  street  ran  uphill  from  the  valley  of  the  town,  by 
daylight  bleak  and  mean,  each  small  house  monotonously 
the  repetition  of  its  neighbor,  but  seen  as  she  saw  it  now, 
blurred  in  the  misty  night,  it  led  like  an  escape  from  man's 
sordid  handiwork  to  the  everlasting  hills  beyond.  Dimly 
the  rim  of  Staithley  Edge  showed  as  she  raised  her  eyes, 
vague  blackness  obscurely  massed  beneath  a  gloomy  sky, 
and  above  it  floated  the  trail  of  smoke  emitted  from  some 
factory-stack  where  the  night  stokers  fed  a  furnace. 
Chimneys,  the  minarets  of  Staithley;  stokers,  the  muez- 
zins ;  smoke,  the  prayer.  Somewhere  wind  stirred  on  the 
blemished  moors  and  a  fresher  air  blew  through  the  street. 
Mary  Ellen  breathed  deeply,  greedily  filling  her  lungs  as 
if  she  feared  that  to  go  from  Staithley  was  to  dive  into 
some  strajige  element  which  would  suffocate  her  unless  she 


MR.  CHOWN  OF  LONDON  203 

had  a  stored  reserve  of  vital  air.     But  she  was  not  think- 
ing that. 

Mr.  Chown  was  watching  her  in  some  bewilderment. 
She  brought  her  eyes  down  from  Staithley  Edge  to  the 
level  of  his  face.     "London's  flat,"  asserted  Mary  Ellen. 

"Not  absolutely,"  he  assured  her. 

"It's  flat,"  she  insisted.  "I'm  going  to  miss  the  Staith- 
ley hills." 

It  was  right  and  proper  for  Mr.  Chown,  agent,  to  have 
his  offices  near  Leicester  Square  and  his  beautifully  fur- 
nished rooms  in  the  Albany ;  but  it  was  not  right  for  Mary 
Ellen  Bradshaw  to  adumbrate  the  instincts  of  the  hom- 
ing pigeon.  In  Mr,  Chown's  opinion,  home  was  a  super- 
stition of  the  middle-classes,  and  if  an  artist  was  not  a 
nomad  at  heart,  the  Avorse  artist  she. 

He  returned  to  his  seat  in  the  Drill  Hall,  with  his  bright 
certainty  of  Mary  Ellen  a  trifle  dimmed  by  her  unreadi- 
ness to  forget  the  Staithley  hills,  just  as  Walter  Pate  an- 
nounced the  judges'  decision  of  the  choral  competition. 
Staitliley  Bridge  were  not  the  first;  he  faced  an  audience 
which  was  three  parts  Staithley  and  gave  the  verdict  to 
another  choir.  It  was  wonderful  proof  of  their  opinion 
of  Walter  Pate  that  there  was  no  disposition  to  mob  the 
referee. 


CHAPTER  V 


HUGH   DARLEy's   HANDIWORK 


IT  is  not  to  be  gainsaid  that  Tom  Bradsliaw  heard  of 
the  flight  of  Mary  Ellen  with  relief.  "I  don't  know 
if  I'm  a  doubting  Thomas:  I'm  sure  I'm  a  doubting 
Quixote,'*  had  been  his  thought  lately  when  he  remitted 
Walter  his  half  share  of  her  expenses.  He  was  very  cer- 
tain now  that  he  was  the  one  good  Bradshaw,  and  whatever 
backward  glances  Walter  might  cast  Tom  closed  the  ac- 
count of  Mary  Ellen  with  finality.  He  would  neither  see 
nor  hear  that  young  woman  again.  "I  blame  myself," 
he  wrote  to  Walter.  "She  is  a  Bradshaw  and  I  ought  to 
have  stopped  your  foolisluiess  instead  of  going  shares  in 
it.  I'll  stop  it  now,  though,  and  when  you  write  of  going 
to  the  police  I  say  I  won't  have  it.  Forget  her.  (If  it 
comes  to  police,  owd  lad,  what  price  yon  pair  of  white- 
slaving  procurers,  thee  and  me?).  This  man  Chown  that 
you  say  you  suspect.  I've  made  enquiries  and  there's 
nothing  the  matter  with  Chown.  And  if  he  looted  her 
from  us,  who  looted  first?  It's  a  blow  to  you,  but 
honestly,  Walter,  better  sooner  than  later  and  she  would 
have  cut  and  run  when  it  suited  her.  She's  a  Bradshaw. 
Bar  me,  Bradshaws  are  muck." 

Meanwhile,  the  organizer  of  victory  was  making  first 
tactical  moves  in  his  Mary  Ellen  campaign.  He  made 
them  in  a  spacious  room  whose  admirable  furniture  sug- 
gested that  this  was  the  Holy  of  Holies  of  some  eminent 

dealer  in  antiques  until  one  noticed  the  large,  floridly 

204 


HUGH  DARLEY'S  HANDIWORK  205 

signed  photographs  on  the  walls  and  the  parti-colored 
advertising  sheet  which  announced  all  West  End  attrac- 
tions and  contradicted  crudely  the  Persian  rugs  on  the 
floor:  the  private  office  of  Mr.  Hubert  Rossiter,  that 
elderly  miracle  of  youthful  dappemess  whose  queer  high- 
stepping  walk  suggested,  especially  when  he  rehearsed  a 
crowd  of  chorus-girls,  nothing  so  much  as  a  bantam-cock. 
He  had  developed,  to  an  extraordinary  degree,  the  knack 
of  knowing  what  the  public  wanted  and  of  fitting  together, 
like  the  pieces  of  a  jig-saw  puzzle,  incongruous  parts  that 
merged  under  his  touch  into  the  ordered  whole  of  a  popu- 
lar entertainment.  He  wasn't,  artistically,  without  scru- 
ple, but  Hubert  Rossiter  with  his  two  sweetstuff  shops  in 
town  and  his  several  touring  companies  in  the  country 
was  a  prophet  of  theatrical  standardization:  a  safe  man, 
with  no  highbrow  pretensions  about  him,  never  short  of 
other  people's  money  for  the  financing  of  his  productions. 

Chown  had  been  called  into  the  Presence  about  a  matter 
which  might  have  caused  friction  on  any  other  day.  To- 
day, Chown  wanted  something  of  Rossiter  and  the  threat- 
ening clouds  dissolved  in  smiling  sunshine.  That  affair 
settled,  Chown  took  up  his  hat,  then  stopped. 

"By  the  way,  Hubert,"  he  said,  "whom  would  you  say 
is  the  toughest  stage  manager  you've  got  on  tour?" 

•'There's  Darley.  Darley  doesn't  wear  kid  gloves. 
He's  out  with  'The  Little  Viennese.'  I'm  told  they  call 
that  company  'The  Little  Ease.'  " 

*'Just  what  I'm  looking  for.  That's  the  South  tour, 
isn't  it?"  asked  Chown  who  did  not  want  Mary  Ellen  to 
visit  Staithley. 

"Yes." 

"Well,  will  you  take  a  girl  from  me  and  put  her  in  the 
chorus  and  ask  Darley  with  my  compliments  to  give  her 
hell?" 

"I  conclude  from  this  that  you  want  to  get  back  on 


:.do  HEPPLESTALL'S 

some  one  who's  been  pestering  you  to  get  a  perfect  lady 
on  the  stage." 

"If  I  were  not  an  honest  man,  I'd  let  you  go  on  think- 
ing that.  But  when  she's  had  three  months  of  Darley,  I'm 
going  to  ask  you  to  give  her  a  part  in  another  show  and 
then  a  lead  and — " 

"My  dear  Lexley,  you  have  only  to  command.  I  run 
my  companies  solely  for  your  convenience." 

"Seriously,  Hubert,  you  can  have  first  option  on  this 
girl  at  a  hundred  a  week  in  town  two  3'ears  hence,  and 
she'll  be  cheap  at  that.     Would  you  like  to  see  her  now?" 

"I  hate  looking  at  raw  meat.     What  are  her  points?" 

*'She  can  sing." 

Mr.  Rossitcr  shrugged  his  shoulders.  "She's  nothing 
in  my  life  for  that,"  he  said. 

"She's  got  youth." 

*'Flapper  market's  depressed,  Lexley.  Give  me  experi- 
ence all  the  time." 

"Darley's  seeing  to  the  experience.  I  tell  you,  Hu- 
bert—" 

"Oh,  I  know.  The  perfect  Juliet.  I'm  always  hearing 
of  her.  Never  seen  her  yet."  Mr.  Rossiter  pressed  a 
bell,  and  the  immediacy  of  the  response  suggested  that  Mr. 
Claud  Drayton,  who  entered,  lived  up  to  the  part  for 
which  he  was  cast,  of  Field-Marshal  to  the  Napoleon, 
Rossiter.     "Got  her  with  you,  Chown?"  asked  Rossiter. 

"I  did  venture  to  bring  her." 

"You  would.  Drayton,  Chown's  got  a  girl  here. 
Chorus  in  'The  Little  Viennese'  for  three  months.  Maisie 
in  *The  Girl  from  Honolulu'  after  that.  Get  reports  and 
let  me  see  them.  That'll  do.  Good-by,  Chown."  He 
pressed  another  bell  and  a  shorthand  typist  appeared  as 
if  by  magic :  he  was  dictating  letters  to  her  before  Chown 
and  Drayton  had  left  the  room.  It  was  efficiency  raised 
to  the  histrionic  degree. 


HUGH  DARLEY'S  HANDIWORK  207 

Drayton  had  eliminated  surprise  from  his  official  life, 
but  he  couldn't  restrain  an  instinctive  gasp  at  the  sight  of 
Mary  Ellen  when  Chown  urbanely  ushered  her  into  his 
room.  He  gasped  because  she  did  not  comply  with,  she 
violated,  the  first  principle  of  an  applicant  for  an  engage- 
ment in  the  chorus.  The  first  principle  was  that  to  ap- 
ply with  any  chance  of  success  for  a  job  worth  thirty-five 
shillings  a  week,  you  must  wear  visible  clothing  worth 
thirty-five  pounds ;  and  Mary  Ellen  was  in  the  Sunday 
clothes  of  Staithley.  Her  costume  was  three  seasons  be- 
hind the  fashions  when  it  was  new,  her  shoes  were  made 
for  durability,  and  her  hair-dressing  made  Mr.  Drayton 
think  of  his  boyhood,  when  he  had  gone  to  Sunday  school. 
But  he  had  his  orders  and  here  was  Lexley  Chown  remark- 
ably sponsoring  this  incredible  applicant.  He  took  out  a 
contract-form.  "Name?  Sign  here.  The  company's 
at  Torquay.  Report  yourself  at  the  theater  to  Mr. 
Darley  to-morrow.  You'll  travel  midnight.  Show  this 
in  the  office  and  they'll  give  3'ou  your  fare."  He  fired 
it  all  at  her  almost  without  interval,  sincerely  flattering 
the  manner  in  which  his  chief  addressed  him,  and,  as  a 
rule,  he  flustered  the  well-dressed,  experienced  ladies  he 
addressed.  Here  was  one  who  was  not  experienced,  who 
was  dressed  so  badly  that  he  thought  of  her  as  a  joke  in 
bad  taste  and,  confound  her,  she  was  not  flustered.  She 
took  the  contract  and  tlie  payment-slip  from  him  calmly, 
eyeing  him  with  a  steady  gaze  which  reduced  his  self-im- 
portance to  the  vanishing  point.  "Good-by.  Good 
luck,"  he  jerked  at  her  with  the  involuntariness  of  an 
automaton. 

She  did  not  intend  to  seem  disdainful;  she  was  merely 
tired  and  the  summary  marching  orders  by  a  midnight 
train  bewildered  her.  Mr.  Chown,  squiring  her  in  her  in- 
congruous clothes  from  the  Rossiter  headquarters, 
thought  h«  had  reason  to  congratulate  himself. 


208  HEPPLESTALL'S 

There  was,  first,  the  document,  terrifyingly  bespattered 
with  red  seals,  which  she  had  signed  in  his  office.  She 
might  be  a  minor,  but  she  had  set  hand  and  seal  to  the 
statement  that  she  was  legally  of  age  and  to  the  under- 
taking on  the  part  of  Mary  Ellen  Bradshaw,  hereinafter 
known  as  the  artiste  and  for  professional  pui*poses  to  be 
known  as  Mary  Arden,  to  employ  Lexley  Chown  as  her 
sole  agent  at  the  continuing  remuneration  of  ten  per  cent 
of  her  salary,  paid  weekly  by  the  artiste  to  the  agent. 
Formidable  penalties  were  mentioned,  two  clerks  witnessed 
their  signatures  with  magisterial  gravity  and  "Alto- 
gether," thought  Mr.  Chown,  refraining  from  handing  her 
a  copy  of  their  agreement,  "if  she  shuffles  out  of  that, 
she'll  be  spry." 

There  was,  second,  the  compliance  of  Mr.  Rossiter  and 
the  coming  noviciate  under  Darley.  Deliberately  he  had 
left  her  in  her  country  clothes,  trusting  them  to  disguise 
in  the  Rossiter  offices  a  quality  he  did  not  wish  to  be 
clearly  apparent  yet:  deliberately,  he  had  rushed  her 
affair  thinking  all  the  while  of  Darley — or  if  not  of  him, 
of  a  Darlc}^,  of  some  crude  martinet  who  was  to  lick  her 
into  shape.  He  wanted  her  ill-dressed,  he  wanted  her  be- 
wildered. He  wanted  Darley  to  know  how  raw  she  was; 
he  wanted  hot  fire  for  her  and  he  saw  her  Staithley  clothes 
acting  upon  Darley  like  compressed  air  on  a  blast  furnace. 
The  girl  was  too  cool,  she  showed  no  nervousness.  "Dar- 
ley will  teach  you  to  feel,  my  girl,"  he  thought:  "I*m 
making  your  path  short,  but  I  don't  want  it  smooth. 
Soft  places  don't  make  actresses.  I'm  cruel  to  be  kind." 
And  being  kind  he  advanced  her  two  pounds  on  account 
of  commission,  told  her  the  station  for  Torquay  was  Pad- 
dington  and  left  her  on  Rossiter's  steps.  He  had  ex- 
posed himself  unavoidably  to  the  lifted  brows  which  could 
not  help  saluting  the  glossy  Lexley  Chown  in  the  company 
of  these  obsolete  clothes,  but  the  necessity  was  past  now 


HUGH  BARLEY'S  HANDIWORK  209 

and  he  lost  no  time  in  indicating  to  her  that,  for  better 
or  for  worse,  her  future  was  in  her  own  hands.  He  had 
other  business  to  attend  to. 

Mary  Ellen,  who  had  surrendered  herself  confidingly  to 
his  large  protectiveness,  was  braced  by  his  departure. 
Their  journey  together,  the  w^onder  of  lunching  at  a  table 
in  a  train,  the  oppressiveness  of  offices — these  were  behind 
her  now  and  she  stood  on  Rossiter's  busy  steps  breathing 
hard  like  a  swimmer  who  comes  to  surface  after  a  long 
dive.  She  breathed  the  air  of  London  and  looked  from 
that  office  down  a  street  across  Piccadilly  Circus,  name- 
less to  her.  The  whirl  of  it  assaulted  her;  the  swimmer 
was  in  the  breakers  now. 

Mr.  Rossiter's  commissionaire,  not  unaccustomed  to  the 
sight  of  young  women  pausing  distressfully  on  those  steps 
where  they  had  left  their  hopes  behind  them,  addressed  her 
with  kindly  intent.     "Shall  I  get  you  a  taxi,  miss?" 

"No,  thanks,"  said  Mary  Ellen,  who  had  noted  the  im- 
mense sums  Mr.  Chown  had  paid  to  the  drivers  of  those 
vehicles.  "I'll  walk,"  and  "others  walk"  she  thought. 
"I  can  do  what  they  can,"  and  hardily  set  foot  upon  the 
London  streets.  Let  that  commissionaire  perceive  that 
Mary  Ellen  was  afraid?  Not  she,  and  presently  she  was 
so  little  afraid  that  she  asked  the  way  to  Euston  of  a 
policeman.  Her  suit-case — in  strict  fact,  Mr.  Pate's  suit- 
case— was  at  Euston. 

The  man  in  the  left  luggage  office  at  Euston  was  good 
enough  to  tell  her  the  way  to  Paddington,  but  "You  can't 
carry  that,"  he  said.  "Why  not?"  said  Mary  Ellen,  and 
carried  it.  The  case  was  heavy  and  grew  heavier:  but 
there  were  stretches  of  her  route,  the  part,  for  instance, 
between  Tottenham  Court  Road  and  Portland  Road, 
which  revived  her  spirit.  That  might  have  been  a  bit  of 
Staithley.  London  was  flat ;  she  had  seen  no  reason  in 
the    slight    rise    of    Shaftesbury    Avenue    to   justify   Mr. 


210  HEPPLESTALL'S 

Chown's  qualifying  "Not  absolutely";  but  there  were 
sights  and  smells  along  the  road  to  Paddington  which  she 
accepted  gratefully  as  evidence  of  some  affinity  with 
Staithley.  Piccadilly  Circus  was  not  the  whole  of  Lon- 
don ;  one  could  breathe  here  and  there,  Praed  Street  way, 
in  cheering  shabbiness.  She  saw  a  barefoot  girl,  and  a 
ragged  boy  offered  to  carry  her  bag.  There  was  still  a 
confused  echo  of  the  surging  West  End  in  her  ears  and 
she  hadn't  conquered  London,  but  she  had  received  com- 
forting assurance  that,  in  spots,  London  was  habitable. 

She  fortified  herself  with  tea  at  Paddington,  remem- 
bered the  night  journey  and  bought  buns  at  the  counter, 
remembered  the  night  journey  again  and  slept  in  a  wait- 
ing-room, cushioned  on  her  bag,  till  it  was  nearly  mid- 
night. There  was  notliing  in  this  precautionary  garner- 
ing of  sleep  to  prevent  her  from  sleeping  in  the  train,  and 
her  through  carriage  to  Torquay  was  being  shunted  at 
Newton  Abbot  when  she  awoke  and  hungrily  ate  buns. 
Near  Dawlish,  she  had  the  first  sight  in  her  life  of  the 
sea,  and  all  the  emotions  proper  to  the  child  of  an  island 
race  ought  to  have  besieged  her  in  the  gra}'^  dawn.  "It's 
big,"  she  thought,  grudging  the  sea  the  character  of  space, 
then  turned  her  eyes  inland  to  the  cliffs.  "They're  small, 
but  they're  better  than  the  sea."  Not  Staithley  Edge, 
but  elevation  of  a  sort. 

Mr.  Hugh  Darley,  arriving  at  the  theater  at  eleven 
o'clock,  was  told  by  the  doorkeeper  that  a  young  lady  was 
waiting  for  him. 

"Been  here  long?"  he  asked,  looking  through  Mary 
Ellen  who  stood  in  the  passage. 

"I  came  on  duty  when  the  night-watchman  went  off  at 
nine.      She  was  here  then." 

"More  fool  she,"  he  said.  "Got  my  letters  there.?" 
The  doorkeeper  had  his  letters,  including  one  from  Mr. 
Drayton. 


HUGH  BARLEY'S  HANDIWORK  211 

Darley  was  a  small  man,  with  a  shock  of  red  hair  and 
intensely  blue  eyes  which  gleamed  sometimes  with  the  light 
of  an  almost  maniacal  fury.  It  was  this  uncontrolled 
temper  which  kept  him  out  of  London:  at  his  job,  the  job 
of  infusing  energy  and  "go"  into  bored  chorus  girls  and 
of  supplying  spontaneity  and  drollery  to  comedians  who 
had  neither  spontaneity  nor  drollery  of  their  own,  he  was 
masterly  when  he  kept  his  temper.  A  stage  manager 
needn't  suffer  fools  gladl}^  but  he  must  suffer  them 
suavely,  he  must  hide  his  sufferings  and  must  cajole  when 
his  every  instinct  is  to  curse,  and  Darley  was  a  touring 
stage  manager  instead  of  a  London  "producer"  because  he 
simply  could  not  roar  them  as  'twere  any  nightingale  and 
London  players  were  too  well  established  not  to  be  able 
effectually  to  resent  his  Eccles'  vein:  the  strollers  were 
not. 

He  read  Drayton's  letter  through.  "Where  is  she.'"'  he 
asked. 

"^\liy,  here,"  said  the  doorkeeper. 

"But,"  said  Mr.  Darley  and  then  "Christ!"  he  cried, 
and  bit  through  his  pipe.  That  often  happened:  he 
carried  sealing  wax  in  his  pocket  for  plugging  the  hole. 
*'Comes  to  a  theater  at  eight  in  the  morning  and  dresses 
like  a  sculler}'  maid's  night  out.  What'll  they  send  me 
next.''  I  suppose  you  ere  what  they've  sent  me.''  What's 
your  name?" 

"Mary  Arden." 

He  consulted  the  advice  note  of  these  extraordinary 
goods.  "That's  right,"  he  admitted.  "Arden!  Whom 
did  you  see  as  Rosalind.'"' 

Mary  Ellen  blushed:  he  seemed  to  her  to  read  her  se- 
crets. "And  me  a  man  that  respects  Shakespeare,"  he 
said.  "There's  one  line  of  the  Banished  Duke  you  may 
remember.  'Sweet  are  the  uses  of  adversity.'  If  you 
don't    remember    the  line,   you're    going   to,  Miss    Mary 


212  HEPPLESTALL'S 

Arden.     You  chose  the  name.     I  don't  know  that  I  don't 
choose  to  make  you  worthy  of  it." 

"Oh,  will  you.'"'  she  cried. 

"You've  got  no  sense  of  humor,"  he  said.  "Come  on 
the  stage  and  we'll  see  what  you  have  got.  It'll  be  like 
going  water-finding  in  the  Sahara.  Can  you  read 
music?" 

"Yes,"  she  said. 

"Then  be  looking  at  those  songs.  There's  a  piano  in 
the  orchestra.     I'm  going  down  to  it." 

She  was  staring  in  amazement  at  the  sheeted  audi- 
torium into  which  the  unexpected  rake  of  the  stage  seemed 
threatening  to  precipitate  her.  Vague  masses  hung  over 
her  head  in  the  half-light  seeming  about  to  fall  and  crush 
her  in  the  grish^  loneliness  to  which  she  was  abandoned  as 
Mr.  Darley  went  round  to  the  orchestra.  The  diminished 
echoes  of  his  footfalls  were  a  wan  assurance  that  this 
place,  shunned  by  daylight  as  if  it  were  a  tomb,  had  con- 
tacts with  humanity.  But  he  had  said  it  was  the  stage 
and  however  disconcerting  she  might  find  its  obscure 
menace,  the  stage  was  where  she  wished  to  be  and  she  was 
not  to  be  put  down  either  by  it  or  by  a  little  man  who 
was  rude  about  her  best  clothes,  while  he  had  not  shaved 
that  morning  and  his  knickerbockers  showed  a  rent  verg- 
ing on  the  scandalous.  She  had  to  sing  to  him  and  she 
expelled  her  terrors  of  her  strange,  her  so  alarmingly 
dreary  surroundings,  and  strained  her  eyes  to  read  the 
music  he  had  put  into  her  hands. 

He  seemed  to  bob  up  below  her  like  a  jack-in-the-box, 
and  struck  some  chords  on  the  piano.  "Have  you  got 
that  one?"  he  asked. 

"Yes,"  she  said,  fighting  her  impulse  to  scream  at  the 
phenomenon  of  his  sudden  reappearance. 
"Then  let  her  go.' 


» 


HUGH  BARLEY'S  HANDIWORK  213 

She  sang  the  opening  chorus  of  "The  Little  Viennese." 
"You've  sung  that  before,"  he  said,  accusingly. 

"Oh,  no." 

"Don't  try  to  kid  me.  It  won't  pay.  Read  through 
the  one  you've  got  there  marked  3."  No.  3  was  a  new 
interpolation;  she  might  know  the  rest,  but  she  couldn't 
know  No.  3.  "Ready?  Go  on,"  and,  in  a  minute,  sur- 
prised, satisfied  but  by  no  means  inclined  to  show  his  satis- 
faction other  than  by  cutting  the  trial  short,  "That'll  do, 
that'll  do,"  he  said  resentfully.  "This  isn't  the  Albert 
Hall.     What  about  your  dancing?" 

*'I'm  afraid  I  haven't  danced  yet,"  said  Mary. 

*'You  will,"  he  said  savagely,  "and  to  my  piping.  I 
knew  there  was  a  catch  in  it  somewhere,"  he  thought,  "but 
it  comes  to  me  that  I've  found  a  hobby  for  the  rest  of  this 
tour.  They  don't  often  send  me  stuft'  that's  worth  work- 
ing on. — I  suppose  you  took  the  name  of  Arden  because 
you've  got  a  wooden  leg,"  he  jeered  aloud. 

Mary  Ellen's  face  clouded,  then  an  accomplishment  of 
her  street  days  came  back  to  her.  They  were  not,  after 
all,  so  long  ago.  She  pitched  her  hat  into  the  wings  and, 
reckless  of  the  rake  of  the  stage,  turned  rapid  cartwheels. 

"It's  that  sort  of  wood,"  she  said,  breathless  but  de- 
fiant. 

"Thanks  for  the  assurance,"  he  said,  "only  this  isn't 
a  circus  and  your  legs  are  wooden.  They're  wooden  be- 
cause you've  no  brains  in  them  and  till  you  have  brains 
in  your  toes  you're  no  use  to  me.  You've  got  an  accent 
that's  as  thick  as  pea-soup  and  till  you've  cleared  it,  it'll 
stay  hidden  in  the  chorus.  If  you'll  work,  I'll  teach  you 
to  act  but,  by  the  Lord,  you've  work  ahead  of  you.  If  I 
take  trouble  and  you  don't  work,  I'll  flay  you  alive.  Is 
that  understood?  Very  well.  There's  a  matinee  to-day. 
You  come  in  and  see  the  show  this  afternoon  and  you  see 


214  HEPPLESTALL'S 

it  again  to-night.  You'll  be  sitting  where  I  can  see  you 
and  if  I  catch  you  laughing,  I'll  eat  you.  Leave  laughing 
to  the  audience;  it's  their  job.  You're  there  to  learn. 
Watch  what  the  other  girls  do  and  when  they  do  it. 
They'll  love  you  l^cause  I'm  calling  a  chorus  rehearsal 
for  you  to-morrow.  Make  mistakes  then  if  you  dare. 
You'll  play  to-morrow  night.  See  the  wardrobe  mistress 
between  the  shows  to-day  about  your  clothes.  I'm  paid 
to  make  you  a  chorus  girl ;  you'll  be  in  the  chorus  to- 
morrow night.  Then  I  begin  to  have  my  fun  with  you. 
I  begin  to  make  your  name  something  else  than  an  im- 
pertinence. I  get  busy  on  you,  my  girl.  You're  clay 
and  I'm  the  potter.  Meantime,  we'll  go  to  the  door  and 
I'll  tell  the  first  girl  who  comes  for  her  letters  to  show  you 
where  you're  likely  to  find  rooms  and  you  can  ask  her  why 
Hugh  Darley  proposes  to  spend  four  hours  a  day  break- 
ing in  a  chorus  girl.'* 

Mary  asked  the  other  girl,  who  looked  curiously  at  her. 
**I  never  knew  Darley  to  make  love  before,"  she  said. 

"Love !"  said  Mary,  blinking  startled  eyes  as  if  a  flash- 
light had  blazed  at  her  out  of  darkness. 

"Well,"  said  her  cynical  friend,  "when  you've  been  more 
than  five  minutes  on  the  stage,  you'll  know  that  the  way 
to  success  lies  through  the  manager's  bedroom.  Don't 
look  at  me  like  that.  Down  your  nose.  I'm  not  a  suc- 
cess, I'm  in  the  chorus  running  straight  on  thirty-five 
shillings  a  week,  and  there  are  more  of  us  keep  straight 
than  don't." 

Mary  was  not  conscious  that  she  had  looked,  fastidi- 
ously or  otherwise,  at  her  companion.  She  had  a  feeling 
of  vertigo;  she  was  thinking  of  herself,  not  of  the  other 
girl,  and  of  this  shameful  threat  before  which  she  seemed 
to  stand  naked  in  her  bones. 

**We  don't  look  after  other  people's  morals,"  Dolly 


HUGPI  BARLEY'S  HANDIWORK  215 

Chandler  assured  her,  "but  you  may  care  to  know  Bar- 
ley's married." 

"You  think  he  meant — this  ?" 

Bolly  shrugged  her  shoulders.     "He's  a  man." 

"And  he  meant  you  to  tell  me  what  you  are  telling  me  .P" 

"You're  pretty  green,  you  know.  I  expect  he  thought 
I'd  put  you  wise.  Though  I  tell  you  again  it's  not  like 
what  I've  seen  of  Barley  to  do  the  sultan  stunt." 

And  in  ordinary  clothes  she  had  turned  cartwheels  be- 
fore this  man !  Mary  Ellen  blushed  scarlet  consterna- 
tion. 

Mr.  Chown's  thought,  "Barley  will  teach  you  to  feel," 
was  taking  rapid  substance,  but  she  must  drive  it  from  her, 
she  must  go  to  the  theater  and  sit  through  two  perform- 
ances and  memorize,  memorize. 

*'That  will  do,"  said  Barley  after  the  rehearsal  next 
day.  "Miss  Arden  will  stay  behind.  You  can  go  on 
to-night,"  he  told  her  as  the  rest  went  up  the  stairs. 
"You've  got  the  tunes  if  you  haven't  got  the  words  and 
they're  damnfool  enough  not  to  matter  though  you'll  know 
them  by  Saturday.  You've  got  a  clumsy  notion  of  the 
movements,  but  you  don't  know  how  to  move.  Your  idea 
of  walking  is  to  put  one  foot  in  front  of  the  other. 
You're  as  God  made  you,  but  he's  sent  you  to  a  good  con- 
tractor for  the  alterations.  He's  sent  you  to  me.  Bid 
you  get  Bolly  Chandler  to  answer  that  question.'"' 

She  failed  to  meet  his  eye.  Telling  herself  she  was  a 
coward,  she  tried  and  failed. 

"I  see,"  he  said.  "She  answered  it  the  way  they'll  all 
answer  it.  I'm  going  to  put  in  four  hours  a  day  with 
you  and  Bolly's  told  you  what  they'll  think  of  you. 
Thought's  free  and  it*s  mostly  dregs  and  I  don't  mind. 
What  about  you,  Rosalind?" 

"You  mean  it  won't  be  true.'"'     There  was  a  hope  and 


216  HEPPLESTALL'S 

she  clutched  at  it  with  words  that  came  unbidden  to  her 
lips. 

"True?"  he  roared.  "You — papoose,  you  whippet! 
Don't  cry,  you  whelp.  I  asked  you  a  question.  I  asked 
you  if  you  mind  their  thoughts?" 

"No,"  she  said. 

"Then  we  start  fair,"  he  said.  "I'm  having  you  on  the 
stage  and  I'm  coming  to  see  you  at  your  rooms,  and  if 
you'd  like  to  know  j^our  name  in  tliis  company,  it's  Dar- 
ley's  Darling.  Only  you  and  I'll  know  we  meet  for  work, 
not  play.  I'm  stage  manager  of  a  rotten  musical  comedy 
on  a  scrubby  tour,  but  I'm  a  servant  of  the  theater  and 
I'll  prove  it  on  you." 

He  was,  disinterestedly,  the  theater's  servant,  and  ser- 
vice purged  of  self-interest  is  rare  though  there  is  plenty 
of  voluntary  work  done  in  the  theater.  An  actor  re- 
hearses for  weeks  and  performs  without  fee  in  a  special 
production :  he  may  have  an  enthusiasm  for  the  play  he  is 
to  act,  he  may  feel  that  such  a  play  must,  at  all  costs, 
come  to  birth,  but  somewhere  self-interest  lurks.  The 
play  may  succeed  at  its  special  performance;  it  may  be 
taken  for  a  run,  and,  if  not,  the  actor  still  has  the  hope 
that  his  acting  will  focus  on  him  the  attention  of  critics 
and  managers.  And  if  the  part  he  plays  is  so  incon- 
siderable that  he  cannot  hope  to  attract  notice  to  him- 
self, his  hope  is  that  the  organizers  of  special  productions 
will  note  him  as  a  willing  volunteer  to  be  rewarded,  next 
time,  with  a  distinctive  part. 

For  Darley,  proposing  to  spend  laborious  hours  in 
molding  Mary  Ellen,  there  was  nothing  concrete  to  be 
gained ;  no  credit  from  the  Rossiter  headquarters  and  the 
positive  loss  of  a  reputation  for  asceticism  which  had  been 
a  shield  against  the  advances  of  aspirants  who  believed 
that  success  in  the  theater  was  reached  by  the  road  Dollj 
had  indicated  to  Mary.     He  did  not  flatter  his  company 


HUGH  BARLEY'S  HANDIWORK  217 

by  supposing  that  his  reputation  for  austerity  would  sur- 
vive association  with  Mary.  But,  intimately,  he  would 
have  his  incomparable  gain,  the  matcliless  joy  of  the  crea- 
tive artist  working  on  apt  material. 

"You  can  take  the  rest  of  this  week  in  getting  used  to 
jigging  about  in  the  chorus,"  he  said.  "Then  we'll  begin 
to  work.  Only  you  needn't  despise  musical  comedy. 
There  are  as  many  great  actresses  who  came  out  of  a 
musical  comedy  training  as  out  of  Shakespeare.  Perhaps 
for  the  same  reason  that  white  sheep  eat  more  than  black 
ones." 

He  drilled  her  on  a  dozen  stages  as  the  tour  went  on, 
in  a  dozen  walks  from  the  Parisian's  to  the  peasant's 
("You've  never  heard  of  pedestrian  art,"  he  said,  "but 
this  is  it"),  and  for  dancing,  "You're  too  old,  but  we'll 
get  a  colorable  imitation,"  and  in  her  rooms  they  went 
through  Rosalind  and  Juliet  till  she  spoke  the  lines  in 
English  and  made  every  intonation  to  his  satisfaction. 
"Feel  it,  you  parrot,  feel  it,"  was  his  cry,  and  he  stopped 
his  mockery  of  calling  her  Rosalind.  He  called  her  "Ice- 
berg." 

He  had  taken  her  far,  very  far,  along  the  teclmical  way, 
and  he  had  come  to  a  barrier.  Where  there  was  ques- 
tion of  the  grand  emotions,  her  voice  was  stupid.  She 
seemed  intelligently  enough  to  understand  with  her  brain, 
but  there  was  a  lapse  between  understanding  and  expres- 
sion. "I've  done  all  I'm  going  to,"  thought  Darley. 
"She's  not  an  actress  yet,  she's  only  ready  to  be  one  when 
somebody  breaks  the  eggs  to  make  the  omelette.  I'm 
not  the  somebody." 

Except  that  she  did  not  shirk  work,  she  gave  no  sign 
of  gratitude.  Darley  was  another  Pate,  another  man  who 
was,  to  please  himself,  experimenting  on  her  with  a  sys- 
tem. She  was  not  afraid  of  him  now;  men  in  her  experi- 
ence were  usable  stepping-stones  and  when  their  use  to  her 


218  HEPPLESTALL'S 

was  gone,  she  stepped  from  one  to  another.  In  the  pres- 
ent case  she  saw  clearly  what  he  was  aiming  at  and  the 
necessity  of  this  training  in  technique.  It  had  visible  re- 
sults, it  wasn't,  like  Pate's,  a  journey  to  a  peak  mistily  be- 
yond a  far  horizon  and  it  would,  in  any  case,  last  only 
for  the  three  months  she  was  to  spend  in  the  chorus  of 
"The  Little  Viennese."  He  could  take  pains  with  her  and 
she  would  generously  be  there  to  be  taken  pains  with;  it 
was  a  sort  of  exercise  which  he  preferred  to  playing  golf 
with  the  men  or  the  other  girls  of  the  company,  and  she 
permitted  his  enjoyment  of  the  preference  because  it  was 
of  use  to  her. 

"What  did  you  want  to  go  on  the  stage  for,  anyhow?" 
he  asked  her  once. 

"To  hold  them,"  she  said,  "there!"  And  made  a  ges- 
ture, imperious,  queenly,  that  almost  wrung  applause  from 
him.  "To  have  them  in  my  grip  like  that.  To  know  I've 
got  them  in  my  power." 

"I  think  3'ou'll  do  it,  Mary,  when  you  have  learned  to 
feel,"  he  told  her  soberly. 

She  looked  at  him  with  glittering  eyes.  "Gee,  does  it 
get  you  like  that?"  he  said,  amazed.  Here,  to  be  wel- 
comed with  both  hands,  was  feeling  at  last. 

"Yes,"  said  Mary,  dashing  him  to  earth,  "there's  money 
in  it." 

"You  miserable  slut!'*  he  said,  and  flung  out  of  her 
room. 

Money !  Yet  hadn't  she  excuse  ?  She  feared  poverty, 
having  known  it.  Poverty,  for  her,  was  not  a  question 
of  what  would  happen  to  an  income  of  a  thousand  a  year 
if  the  income  tax  went  up;  it  was  Jackman's  Buildings 
and  the  Staithley  streets.  If  she  could  help  it,  she  was 
not  going  back  to  poverty.  To  Staithley  perhaps  she 
would  go  back :  she  was  indeed  fixed  in  her  idea  to  go  back, 
to  buy,  with  her  stage-made  wealth,  a  house  in  Staithley 


HUGH  BARLEY'S  HANDIWORK  219 

like  Walter  Pate's  and  to  be  rich  in  Staithley.  So  far, 
in  her  journeyings,  she  had  seen  no  place  like  Staithley: 
either  there  was  flatness  which  depressed  her,  or  hills 
which  were  too  urbane,  or  too  low,  too  much  like  mounds 
in  a  park  to  be  woi*thy  of  the  name  of  hills.  The  stage 
was  a  means  to  an  end,  and  the  end  was  Staithley,  a  house 
of  her  own,  an  independence^ — and  her  present  salary  was 
thirty-five  shillings  a  week,  less  ten  per  cent  to  Chown! 
She  was,  at  any  rate,  thrifty  with  it,  seeing  no  need,  on 
tour,  with  her  contract  in  her  pocket,  to  revise  her  ward- 
robe in  the  direction  of  effectiveness  and  keeping  her  nose 
too  closely  to  the  grindstone  Darley  held  to  have  time  for 
money-spending  in  other  ways.  She  watched  with  satis- 
faction her  Post  Office  Savings  Bank  account  increase  by 
a  weekly  ten  shillings. 

Darley  relented  and  came  back  next  day  with  the  Maisie 
part  in  "The  Girl  from  Honolulu"  in  his  pocket.  "Damn 
her,"  he  thought,  "she's  honest  about  it  and  there  have 
been  avaricious  artists.  Avarice  and  Art  aren't  contra- 
dictory." Pie  expected  no  more  at  their  parting  than 
the  cool  "Good-by"  she  gave  him. 

"Full  of  possibilities,"  he  reported  her  to  Drayton,  and 
when  Drayton  asked  him  to  be  more  definite,  "I  can't,"  he 
wrote,  "be  more  definite  than  this.  You  know  those 
Chinese  toys  consisting  of  a  box  within  a  box  of  beautiful 
wood,  wonderfully  made?  You  marvel  at  the  worlonan- 
ship  and  you  open  box  after  box.  You  get  tired  and  you 
go  on  opening  because  each  box  is  beautiful  and  because 
of  a  faint  hope  you  have  that  there'll  be  something  in  the 
last  box.  I  don't  know  what's  in  hers.  That's  her  secret 
and  her  mystery,  and,  by  the  way,  you  can  discount  what 
Pettigrew  is  going  to  tell  you  of  her  Maisie.  It  isn't  her 
Maisie.     It's  mine.     I've  rehearsed  her  in  it." 

"Darley's  mad  about  her,"  Drayton  interpreted  this  to 
Rossiter. 


220  HEPPLESTALL'S 

Darley  was,  anyhow,  sufficiently  interested  to  travel 
across  half  England  to  see  her  play  Maisie  on  her  first 
Saturday  night,  in  Liverpool.  He  stood  at  the  side  of 
the  circle  where  he  could  watch  both  her  and  the  house, 
and  he  waited,  especially  for  a  scene  which  was  one  of  the 
weaknesses  of  the  piece,  when  Maisie,  by  sheer  blague,  has 
to  subdue  a  rascally  beachcomber  who  intends  robbery. 
He  wasn't  afraid  of  her  song,  but  this  scene  called  for  act- 
ing; it  wasn't  plausible,  even  for  musical  comedy,  unless 
Maisie  carried  it  off  con  brio. 

And  he  had,  that  night,  his  reward  for  the  labor  of 
these  months.  It  was  Saturday  night,  and  the  audience 
stopped  eating  chocolates.  Darley  wasn't  looking  at  the 
stage,  he  was  looking  at  the  audience  and  he  knew  triumph 
when  he  saw  it.  They  stopped  eating.  Darley  looked 
upon  his  work  and  knew  that  it  was  good. 

"/c/fc  dien,"  he  muttered.  "By  God,  I  do.  Where's 
the  bar?" 


CHAPTER  VI 


THE   DREAM  IN    STONE 


IF  some  one  idiosyncratic  and  original,  some  one  bold  to 
challenge  the  accepted  order,  had  dared  to  put  Mary 
Arden  on  her  defense,  if  it  had.  been  asked  what  she  wa^ 
doing  in  the  war,  she  would  have  replied  with  cool  assur- 
ance that  she  was  keeping  her  head  about  it  when  nothing 
was  more  easy  than  intemperance.  Every  day  her  post 
brought  letters  which  encouraged  the  belief,  not  that  she 
made  an  opportunity  of  war,  but  that  she  held  high  rank 
amongst  home-keeping  indispcnsables.  Her  letters  from 
unknown  men  in  the  trenches  were  explicit  that  Mary 
Arden  was  the  England  they  were  fighting  for — food,  if 
she  had  cared  to  eat  it,  for  the  grossest  conceit. 

She  was,  by  now,  the  leading  musical  comedy  exponent 
of  demureness,  with  Chown  as  her  undroppable  pilot; 
and  Pate,  Darley  and  a  procession  of  stage  managers  who 
had  steered  less  ably  than  that  devoted  pair  were  for- 
gotten rungs  on  the  ladder  she  had  climbed.  She  kept 
her  head  about  things  more  yeasty,  in  her  microcosm  more 
demoralizing,  than  the  war;  she  kept  her  head  about  suc- 
cess and  kept  it  about  men.  She  rode  vanity  on  the  snaffle 
because  she  was  herself  ridden  by  ambition. 

Once  the  ambition  had  been  trivial,  once  she  had  aimed 
no  higher  than  a  house  in  Staithley  as  big  as  Walter 
Pate's,  but  she  had  grown  since  then  and,  with  her,  ambi- 
tion grew,  rooted  in  something  older  than  her  vanity  or 

than  herself,  rooted  in  the  Bradshaw  hatred  of  the  Hep- 

221 


222  HEPPLESTALL'S 

plestalls.  Secretly  she  nursed  her  ambition  to  possess  a 
great  house  on  Staithley  Edge,  high,  dominating  the  town 
of  the  Hepplestalls,  a  house  to  make  the  old  Hall  look  like 
a  cottage,  a  house  where  she  would  live,  resuming  her  name 
of  Bradshaw,  eclipsing  the  Hepplestalls  in  Staithley. 

In  eyes  accustomed  to  the  London  she  had  conquered, 
the  Hepplestalls  dwindled  while  Mary  Arden,  star,  looked 
very  big.  There  was  veritable  conspiracy  to  augment  her* 
sense  of  self-importance  and  even  the  newspapers,  as  the 
war  degenerated  into  routine,  gave  of  their  restricted 
space  to  say,  repeatedly,  that  Mary  Arden  wa^  a  "per- 
son." To  such  an  one,  her  ambition  seemed  no  foolish- 
ness, but  it  wasn't  to  be  done  just  yet — nor  by  practicing 
such  crude  economies  as  those  of  her  first  cheese-paring 
tour.  Dress  mattered  to  her  now;  it  belonged  with  her 
position  like  other  sumptuosities  inseparable  from  a  posi- 
tion which  was  itself  a  symbol  of  extravagance.  She  rode 
the  whirlwind  of  the  war,  a  goddess  of  the  Leave  Front, 
dressing  daintily  as  men  would  have  her  dress,  but  if  there 
was  lavishness  at  all  it  was  for  professional  purposes  only. 
It  was  lavishness  corrected  by  prudence,  lavishness  calcu- 
lated to  maintain  a  position  which  was  to  lead  her  to  a 
house  in  Staithley  Edge.  She  was  a  careful  spendthrift, 
and  she  was  careful,  too,  in  other  ways.  The  dancing 
and  the  dining,  the  being  seen  with  the  right  man  at  the 
right  places — these  were  not  so  much  the  by-products  of 
success  as  its  buttresses ;  and  to  be  expert  in  musical 
comedy  acting  implies  expertness  in  the  technique  of  being 
a  gay  companion.  She  exercised  fastidious  selectiveness, 
but,  having  chosen,  gave  her  company  at  costly  meals  to 
young  officers  who  returned  to  France  swaggering  in.  soul, 
mentioning  aloud  with  infinite  casualness  that  they  had 
lunched  with  Mary  Arden.  It  was  tremendously  the  thing 
to  do :  one  might  be  a  lieutenant  in  France  but  one  had 
carried  a  baton  in  London :  and  one  didn't,  even  when  tJie 


THE  DREAM  IN  STONE  223 

sense  of  triumph  led  one  to  the  mood  of  after-dinner  boast- 
ing, hint  that  there  was  anything  but  her  company  at 
meals  or  at  a  dance  to  be  had  from  Mary  Arden.  The 
Hepplestalls  were  going  to  find  no  chink  in  her  immacu- 
late armor  when  she  queened  it  over  them  from  her  great 
house  on  the  hill,  but  to  suggest  that  mere  pride  was  the 
motive  of  her  continence  is  to  do  her  an  injustice. 

Socially  as  well  as  theatrically,  then,  she  had  her  vogue 
and  nothing  seemed  to  threaten  it;  yet  Mr.  Rossiter  had 
the  strange  caprice  to  be  not  wholly  satisfied  with  Mary 
Arden.  As  a  captain  of  the  light  entertainment  industry, 
he  was  doing  exceedingly  well  out  of  the  war;  he  had  a 
high  opinion  of  the  Colonial  soldiery ;  the  young  British 
officer  was  hardly  behind  the  Colonial  private  in  his  eager- 
ness to  occupy  Mr.  Rossiter's  stalls,  and  at  times  when 
leave  was  suspended  the  civilian  population  filled  the 
breach  in  its  very  natural  desire  for  an  antidote  to  anx- 
iety. Surely  he  was  captious  to  be  finding  fault  any- 
where, last  of  all  with  Mary  Arden?  But  Hubert  Ros- 
siter did  not  hold  his  position  by  taking  short  views  or 
by  seeing  only  the  obvious,  and  he  sent  for  Mr.  Chown  to 
discuss  with  him  the  shortcomings  of  his  client,  Miss 
Arden. 

"Sit  down,  Lexley,"  he  said.  "Have  you  read  that 
script  I  sent  you?" 

iMr.  Chown  produced  from  a  neat  attache-case  the  type- 
script of  Mr.  Rossiter's  next  play,  with  a  nod  which  man- 
aged to  convey,  besides  mere  affirmation,  his  deep  admira- 
tion of  the  inspired  managerial  judgment. 

"Well,  now,"  said  Rossiter  briskly,  "about  Mary  Ar- 
den. There's,  every  musical  reason  why  I  should  cast  her 
for  Teresa  in  this  piece.  She  can  sing  the  music.  Les- 
lie's the  alternative  and  Leslie  can't  sing  it.  The  question 
is,  can  Mary  act  it?" 

Mr.  Chown*s  geese  were  not  swans :  he  knew  that  his 


224  HEPPLESTALL'S 

clients,  even  if  they  were  his  clients,  had  limitations.     "I 
saw  her  in  the  other  part  as  I  read  it,  Hubert,"  he  fenced. 

"The  flapper  part  isn't  worth  Mary's  salary.  Now,  is 
it?     Seriously,  I'm  troubled  about  Mary." 

"What's  the  matter  with  her?" 

"She  keeps  her  heart  at  her  banker's  for  one  thing.  Do 
you  know  she  once  came  into  this  office  with  a  'bus  ticket 
stuck  in  the  cuff  of  her  sleeve?  A  leading  part  at  the 
Galaxy  Theatre,  and  rides  in  a  'bus  !" 

"That  wasn't  recently.  Be  fair,  Hubert.  And  where 
do  you  want  her  to  keep  her  heart?" 

"Where  she  wore  the  'bus  ticket.  On  her  sleeve.  If 
she's  so  fond  of  money,  Lexley,  why  doesn't  she  go  after 
it?     There's  plenty  about." 

Cliown  stiffened  in  his  chair.  "As  Miss  Arden's  agent, 
Hubert,"  he  said  severely,  "I  protest  against  that  sug- 
gestion." 

Rossiter  smiled  blandly.  "Right.  You've  done  your 
duty  to  your  client  and  to  the  proprieties.  Now  we'll 
get  down  to  facts." 

"But  anyhow,  Hubert,  don't  forget  what  this  girl  is. 
She  plays  on  her  demure.ness.     It's  Mary's  winning  card." 

*'A  nunnery's  the  place  for  her  sort  of  demureness.  In 
the  theater  a  woman  only  scores  by  demureness  when  it's 
known  to  the  right  people  that  she's  a  devil  off  the  stage." 

"No !     No-,"  cried  Chown.     "You—" 

"The  theater  is  a  place  of  illusion,  my  friend.  In  any 
case,  Mary's  been  doing  flappers  too  long.  She's  getting 
old." 

"You're  simply  being  perverse,  "Hubert."  Mr.  Chown 
was  genuinely  angry.     Mary  Arden  old ! 

"Then,"  said  Rossiter,  "she  began  young  and  it  comes 
to  the  same  thing.  What's  a  play-going  generation? 
Five  years?  Very  well,  for  a  generation  of  playgoers 
she's  been   doing  demure  flappers  and   it's   time  she  did 


THE  DREAM  IN  STONE  225 

something  else  and  time  somebody  else  did  the  flappers. 
And  can  she  do  anything  else?  Can  she?  I'll  tell  you  in 
one  word  what's  the  matter  with  Mary — virginity.'* 

Mr.  Chown  could  only  bow  his  head  in  sorrowing  agree- 
ment. "She  is  immoderate,"  he  said  gloomily  and  Ros- 
siter  stared  at  him,  finding  the  adjective  surprising  un- 
til "  'Everything  in  moderation,  including  virginity,' " 
quoted  Chown. 

"Is  that  your  own?"  asked  Rossiter  with  relish. 

But  Chown  disclaimed  originality  and  even  personal 
knowledge  of  his  mot's  authorship.  He  did  not  read 
books.  He  read  life  and,  especially  on  Thursdays,  the 
Daily  Telegraph.  *'The  man  who  said  it  to  me  said  it 
was  Samuel  Butler's." 

"It's  good,"  pronounced  Rossiter,  writing  the  name 
down.  "I'll  get  Drayton  to  write  to  this  man  Butler  and 
see  if  he'll  do  me  a  libretto.     I  like  his  flavor." 

"I'm  afraid  he's  dead,"  said  Chown. 

"Oh,  tliis  war !"  grieved  Rossiter.  "Tliis  awful  war ! 
Is  it  to  take  all  our  promising  young  men?  Well,  to  come 
back  to  Mary.  I  want  to  cast  her  for  Teresa  and  now, 
candidly,  she  being  what  she  is,  can  I?" 

*'No,"  agreed  Chown. 

"There  it  is!  Waste.  Constriction  of  her  possibili- 
ties. I  wish  you'd  make  her  see  that  it's  bad  for  her  art. 
You  and  I  have  to  watch  over  our  young  women  like 
fathers.  You  brought  this  girl  to  me  and  I've  endorsed 
your  judgment  so  far:  but  she's  got  no  future  if  she 
doesn't  mend  her  ways.  I've  been  thinking  of  reviving 
*The  Duchess  of  Dantzic'  " 

"For  her?"  gasped  Chown.  "Mary  to  play  Sans- 
Gene?" 

*'She  can  sing  it,  but  she  can't  act  it — yet.  If  she's 
out  for  marriage,  get  her  married.  Marry  her  yourself. 
Do  something.     But  a  woman  who  shirks  life  will  never 


226  HEPPLESTALL'S 

play  Sans-Gene."  Rossiter  rose  to  administer  a  friendly 
pat  to  Chown's  shoulder.  "Think  it  over,  old  man,"  he 
said  earnestly.  ^'Meantime,"  he  conceded  graciously, 
"I'll  give  Teresa  to  Leslie  and  Mary  can  flap  once  more. 
But,  I  warn  you,  it's  the  last  time.  I'm  tired  of  real  de- 
mureness.     I  want  real  acting." 

Chown  hesitated  slightly,  then  "Do  you  know,  I've  a 
card  up  my  sleeve  about  Mary,"  he  said. 

"Then,  for  God's  .sake,  play  it,  my  lad.  Play  it.  It's 
overdue." 

*' What  about  giving  her  a  character  part .'"' 

"Character.?  That's  not  her  line.  You  know  as  well 
as  I  do  that  we  can't  monkey  with  the  public's  expecta- 
tions. An  actress  can  afford  anything  except  versa- 
tility." 

"Listen,"  said  Chown.  "I  picked  her  up  in  Lancashire 
and  her  accent's  amazing.  I  needn't  remind  you  .that 
Lancashire  is  almost  as  popular  on  the  stage  as  Ireland. 
As  you  said,  the  tlieater's  a  place  of  illusion." 

"Did  you  notice,"  asked  Rossiter  witheringh'^,  "that 
the  scene  of  this  piece  is  laid  in  Granada?" 

"Does  that  matter?"  asked  Chown  blandly. 

Rossiter  was  turning  over  the  pages  of  the  script. 
"Not  a  bit,"  he  hardily  admitted.  "I'll  take  the  chance, 
Lexley.  We'll  make  her  Lancashire,  and  there's  a  male 
part  that'll  have  to  go  to  Lancashire  too.  What  a  pity 
that  chap  Butler  was  killed  in  the  war.  He'd  have  been 
just  the  man  to  write  it  in.'* 

"I  don't  think  he  was  Lancashire,"  said  Chown  and,  in 
his  turn,  "Does  that  matter?"  asked  Rossiter.  "You  go 
and  have  that  talk  with  Mary  and  leave  me  to  look  after 
authors.  It  takes  doing  nowadays.  Surprising  what 
they'll  ask  for  doing  a  bit  of  re-writing.  Makes  a  hole  in 
a  ten-pound  note  if  you  don't  watch  it." 

Chown  had  a  talk,  rather  than  "that"  talk,  with  Mary, 


THE  DREAM  IN  STONE  22T 

omitting,  for  instance,  Rossiter's  recommendation  of 
matrimony  as  essential  to  an  actress.  Experience,  with 
or  without  marriage  lines,  might  tap  an  emotional  reser- 
voir but,  in  her  case,  the  experience  would  certainly  go 
with  marriage  and  Chown  had  suffered  too  often  by  the  re- 
tirement of  his  successful  clients  after  marriage  to 
risk  advisino"  it.  He  considered  Rossiter  incautious. 
"There's  a  part  for  you  in  'Granada  the  Gay,'  "  he  told 
her,  "that  is  going  to  make  you  a  new  reputation.  A 
Lancashire  part  and  London  will  think  you're  acting  it. 
You  and  I  know  you  are  it,  but  we  won't  mention  that." 

*'This  is  interesting,"  said  Mary  Ellen  with  shining 
eyes.     **I'll  work  at*  this.     I'll  show  them  something." 

Chown  nodded,  satisfied  that  she  would,  in  fact,  "show 
them"  enough  to  silence.  Rossiter's  murmurings  for  the 
next  twa  years — nobody  looked  for  a  shorter  run  than 
that  from  a  musical  comedy  in  war  time — and  Rossiter 
was  indeed  ungrudging  in  his  admission  that  Mary's  de- 
mure Lancastrian,  with  the  terrific  and  accurate  accent 
coming  with-  such  rugged  veracity  from  those  pretty  lips, 
was  the  success  of  "Granada,  the  Gay."  People  were  go- 
ing with  scant  selectiveness  to  all  theaters  alike,  but  there 
were  a  few,  and  the  Galaxy  among  them,  which  had  their 
special  lure. 

It  was  a  curiosity  of  the  time,  full  though  the  theaters 
were,  that  advance  bookings  were  low.  No  one  could  see 
ahead,  no  one's  time  was  his  own  and  perhaps  that  was 
the  reason  or  perhaps  it  was  only  the  sentiment  which 
underlay  the  practice  of  going-  impulsively  to  theaters 
without  the  solemnity  of  premeditation  involved  in  book- 
ing seats  many  days  ahead ;  and  the  two  young  officers, 
sitting  down  to  dinner,  were  not  remarkable  in  expecting 
at  that  late  hour  to  get  stalls  at  any  theater  they  pleased. 
"Libraries" — that  curious  misnomer  of  the  ticket  agencies 
— perhaps  kept  up  their  sleeves  a  parcel  of  certainly  sale- 


228  HEPPLESTALL'S 

able  tickets  for  the  benefit  of  abrupt  men  in  khaki,  but 
libraries  were  crowded  places  to  be  avoided  by  those  who 
had  the  officering  habit  of  telling  some  one  else  to  do  the 
tedious  little  things. 

"We  might  go  on  to  a  show  after  this,"  said  Derek 
Carton.  "Don't  you  think  so,  Fairy?  Waiter,  send  a 
page  with  the  theater  list.     I  want  tickets  for  something," 

His  companion,  only  arrived  that  day  from  France,  let 
his  eyes  stray  sensuously  over  the  appointments  of  the 
restaurant.  He  was  to  eat  in  a  room'  decorated  in  emu- 
lation of  a  palace  at  Versailles ;  the  chefs  were  French ; 
the  guests,  when  they  were  not  American,  were  of  every 
allied  or  neutral  European  nationality;  the  band  plaj'ed 
jazz  music ;  and  to  the  marrow  of  him,  as  he  contemplated 
the  ornate  evidences  of  materialistic  civilization,  he  exulted 
in  liis  England.  The  hardship  was  that  he  couldn't  spend 
the  whole  of  this  leave  in  London :  he  must  go,  to-morrow, 
to  Staithley.  He  was,  he  had  been  for  six  months.  Sir 
Rupert  Hepplestall,  but  when  his  father  died  the  1918 
German  push  was  on  and  leave  impossible.  Decidedly  he 
must  go  North,  this  time,  this  once,  though — oh,  hang  the 
Hepplestalls !  Why  couldn't  they  let  him  go  quietly,  to 
look  in  decent  privacy  at  his  father's  grave?  But  no: 
they  must  make  him  a  director  of  the  firm  and  they  must 
call  a  meeting  for  him  to  att/?nd.  Well-meaning  but  ab- 
surd old  men  who  had  not  or  who  would  not  see  that  Ru- 
pert was  free  of  Hepplestall's  now.  Sincerely  he  mourned 
his  father's  death,  and  they  wouldn't  let  him  be  simple 
about  it,  they  complicated  a  fellow's  pilgrimage  to  Sir 
Philip's  grave  by  their  obtuse  attempt  to  thrust  his  feet 
into  Sir  Philip's  shoes. 

That  needn't  matter  to-night,  though,  that  sour  affront 
to  the  idea  of  leave:  it  was  his  complication  not  Carton's 
who,  good  man,  had  met  him  at  the  station.  Like  Rupert, 
Carton  had  gone  from  Cambridge  to  the  war,  then  he  had 


THE  DREAM  IN  STONE  229 

lost  a  leg  and  now  had  a  job  at  the  War  Office:  and  the 
jolly  thing  was  that  Carton  hadn't  altered,  he  was  as  he 
used  to  be  even  to  calling  Rupert  by  that  old  nickname. 
If  you  have  seventy-three  inches  you  are  naturally  called 
Fairy  and  out  there  nobody  ever  thought  of  calling  you 
anything  else  except  on  frigidly  official  occasions.  But 
you  were  never  quite  sure  of  the  home  point  of  view;  the 
thing  called  war-mind  made  such  amazing  rabid  asses  of 
the  people  who  were  not  fighting  and  you  weren't  certain 
even  of  Carton  and  now  you  were  a  little  ashamed  of  hav- 
ing been  uncertain.  Of  course,  old  Carton  would  not  rot 
him  about  his  title;  of  course,  he  would  call  him  Fairy, 
he  wouldn't  allude  to  that  baronetcy  of  which  Rupert  was 
still  so  shy. 

*'Stop  dreaming.  Fairy,"  said  Derek,  and  he  looked 
across  the  table  to  find  a  page-boy  at  Derek's  elbow  and 
a  theater-list  on  the  table  before  him.  "What  shall  it 
be.?» 

**0h,  Robey,  I  suppose.'* 

**Yes,"  Derek  agreed.  ''Usually  Robey's  first  choice. 
Just  now,  it's  Robey  or  *Granada  the  Gay,*  with  a  girl 
called  Arden." 

*'You're  in  charge,"  said  Rupert.  "I've  heard  of  Mary 
Arden." 

Derek  tried  not  to  look  superior.  **It's  usual,"  he  said. 
*'Galaxy  Theater,  boy,"  and  presently  received  a  pink 
slip  of  paper  entitling  him  to  the  occupancy  of  two  stalls 
that  night.  Nothing  would  have  surprised  him  more  than 
not  to  have  received  it,  an  hour  before  the  curtain  rose  on 
a  musical  comedy  in  the  first  flush  of  brilliant  success. 

They  ate  and  mostly  their  talk  was  superficial.  It 
preserved  a  superficial  air  when  men  who  had  been  killed 
were  spoken  of  and  only  once  did  there  seem  divergence 
in  their  points  of  view.  Some  technical  point  of  gunnery 
came  up  and  Derek,  who  was  at  the  War  Office,  agreed 


230  HEPPLESTALL'S 

that  "We  can't  improve  it  yet.     But  I  tell  you,  old  man, 
in  the  next  war — " 

"That — that  was  a  topping  Turkish  Bath  we  went  to 
before  dinner,"  said  Rupert. 

Derek  stared.     "What!"  he  gasped. 

*'Pm  changing  the  subject,"  said  Rupert  with  a  smile 
of  forgiveness  for  his  friend  who  had  been  home  too  long, 
too  near  to  the  newspapers  and  the  War  Office.  At  the 
Front,  they  didn't  talk  of  the  next  war,  they  were  fight- 
ing the  last  of  the  wars.  But  he  didn't  want  argument 
with  Derek  to-night.  "Are  you  through  that  liqueur.?" 
he  asked.     "Let's  go  on  to  this  theater,  shall  we?" 

Rossiter  could  not  and  did  not  expect  his  commission- 
aires to  emulate  the  silky  suppleness  of  cosmopolitan  head 
waiters,  but  it  was  impressed  upon  them  that  they  were 
not  policemen  on  point  duty  but  the  servants  of  a  gentle- 
man receiving  their  master's  guests ;  he  neglected  nothing, 
*'producing"  the  front  of  the  house  as  he  produced  the 
entertainment  on  the  stage  or  the  business  organization  in 
his  office.  It  was  whispered  to  husbands  that  his  most 
exquisite  achievement  was  the  ladies'  cloak-room.  You 
might  leave  your  restaurant'  savage  at  the  bill,  but  by  the 
time  you  had  progressed  from  the  Galaxy  entrance  to  your 
stall,  j'ou  were  so  saluted,  blarneyed,  caressed,  that  there 
was  no  misanthropy  in  you. 

It  captivated  Rupert;  he  couldn't,  try  as  he  would, 
duplicate  Derek's  stylish  air  of  matter-of-fact  boredom. 
Yesterday  he  was  in  hell  and  to-morrow,  very  likel}'^,  he 
would  swear  if  the  waiter  at  the  hotel  brought  up  tepid 
tea  to  his  bedside;  but  to-night  he  hadn't  made  adjust- 
ments, to-night  he  was  impressible  by  amenity.  And  he 
had  read  in  the  papers  that  London  had  grown  unman- 
nerly!    Outrageous  libel  on  an  earthly  paradise. 

But  it  may  be  hazarded  that  first  steps,  even  in  para- 
dise, are  not  sure-footed,  and  in  spite  of  his  bodily  ease. 


THE  DREAM  IN  STONE  231 

and  the  "atmosphere"  of  Mr.  Rossiter's  stalls  and  his 
eagerness  to  be  amused,  his  mind,  accustomed  to  the  gro- 
tesque convention,  war,  did  not  immediately  accept  the 
grotesque  convention,  musical  comedy.  In  a  day  or  two 
he  would,  no  doubt,  be  as  greedy  of  unreality  as  any  be- 
liever in  the  fantastic  untruths  distributed  to  the  Press 
by  the  War  Office  propaganda  departments,  but  he  was 
too  lately  come  to  Cloud  Cuckoo  Land  to  have  sloughed 
his  sanity  yet.  He  had  yearned  for  color  and  he  had  it 
now;  and  the  vivid  glare  of  a  Rossiter  musical  comedy 
put  an  intolerable  strain  upon  his  eyes,  wliile  the*  humor 
of  the  comedians  put  his  brain  in  chancery.  Home-grown 
jokes,  he  supposed,  and  yet  their  mess  had  fancied  itself 
at  wit.  He  was  regretful  that  he  had  not  insisted  on 
Robey.  Robey  was  the  skilled  liaison  officer  between 
Front  and  Leave.  Robey  jerked  one's  thoughts  irresis- 
tibly into  the  right  groove  at  once ;  he  wouldn't  have  sat 
under  Robey  wilting  to  the  dismal  conviction  that  his 
first  evening  on  leave  was  turning  to  failure. 

Then,  from  off-stage,  a  girl  began  to  speak,  and  Rupert 
sat  taut  in  his  stall.  He  all  but  rose  and  stood  to  atten- 
tion as  Mary  Arden  appeared  in  the  character  of  that 
inapposite  Lancastrian  in  Granada.  She  did  not  merely 
salt  the  meat  for  him;  there  was  no  meat  but  her.  He 
thought  that,  then  blushed  at  the  coarseness  of  a  meta- 
phor which  compared  this  girl  with  meat.  She  spoke  in 
the  dialect  of  Lancashire  and  where  he  had  been  dull  to 
the  humor  of  the  comedians,  all  was  crystal  now.  Bore- 
dom left  him ;  the  morose  sentiment  of  a  ruined  evening 
melted  like  cloud  in  the  sunshine  of  Mary  Arden ;  phoenix- 
like leave  rose  again  to  the  level  of  anticipation  and  be- 
yond. 

Tell  him  that  he  was  ravished  because  she  reminded 
him  of  Staithley,  and  he  would  not  have  denied  that  he  was 
ravished  but  he  would  have  denied  very  hotly  that  Staith- 


232  HEPPLESTALL'S 

ley  had  anjthing  to  do  with  it.     Suggest  that  he  was 
seized  and  held  because  she  spoke  a  dialect  which  was  his 
as  well  as  hers,  and  he  would  have  denied  knowledge  of  a 
single  dialect  word.     But  Rupert  was  born  in  Staithley 
where  dialect,  like  smoke,  is  in  the  air  and  inescapable  and 
Mary  was  calling  to  something  so  deep  in  him  that  he  did 
not  know  he  had  it,  his  love  of  Lancashire  covered  up  and 
locked  beneath  his   school,   Cambridge,   the   Army.     She 
turned  the  key,  she  sent  him  back  to  the  language  he  spoke 
in  boyhood,  not  in  the  nursery  or  the  schoolroom,  but  in 
emancipated  hours  in  the  garage  and  the  stables  where 
dialect  prevailed.     Obstinate  in  his  creed  of  hatred  of  the 
Lancashire  of  the  Hepplestalls,  he  did  not  know  what  she 
had  done  to  him,  but  he  felt  for  Mary  the  intimacy  of  old, 
tried  acquaintanceship.     He  was  unconscious  of  others  on 
the  stage,  even  as  background :  he  was  unconscious  of  being 
in  a  theater  at  all  and  sat  gaping  when  the  curtain  cut  him 
off  from  her  and  Derek  began  to  push  past  liim  with  an 
impatient  "Buck  up.     Just  time  for  a  drink  before  they 
close.     Always  a  scram  in  the  bar.     Come  along." 

"But,"  said  Rupert  still  sitting,  still  stupidly  resenting 
the  intrusion  of  the  curtain,  "but — Mary  Arden." 

"If  that's  the  trouble,  I'll  take  you  round  and  introduce 
you  afterwards.  Anything,  so  long  as  we  don't  miss  this 
drink." 

Derek  led  his  friend  to  the  bar,  where  there  was  oppor- 
tunity for  Rupert,  amongst  a  thirsting  thrusting  mob,  to 
revise  his  estimate  of  London  manners  in  war-time.  ^Vhen 
they  had  secured  whiskies,  "You  know  her !"  Rupert  said, 
jealous  for  the  first  time  of  Derek's  enforced  home-service. 
*'I've  met  her  once,"  said  Derek.  "That's  a  good 
enough  basis  for  introducing  you,  to  an  actress.  But  I 
might  as  well  warn  you.  Mary's  as  good  as  her  reputa- 
tion. A  lot  of  men  have  wasted  time  making  sure  of 
that." 


THE  DREAM  IN  STONE  233 

**I  see,"  said  Rupert  curtly.  "But  you'll  introduce 
me." 

"Yes,"  said  Derek,  "if  you  insist."  He  had  brought 
Rupert  to  the  Galaxy  because  it  was  the  thing-  to  do,  just 
as  he  had  met  Mary  for  the  same  reason,  but  he  resented 
her  strangeness.  To  Derek  an  actress  who  was  not  only 
notoriously  but  actually  "straight"  was  simply  not  play- 
ing the  game  and  he  was  reluctant  to  add  Rupert  to  the 
train  of  her  exhibited  and  deluded  admirers.  Whereas 
Rupert  would  have  shrunk  aghast  at  the  temerity 
of  his  thoughts  if  he  had  realized  Mary  as  an  ac- 
tress and  a  famous  one.  He  was,  in  all  modesty,  see- 
ing her  possessively  because  she  and  he  were  alone  in  a 
crowd. 

He  had  to  mar  with  Lancashire  this  leave  which  had 
suddenly  turned  so  glamorous ;  there  was  the  more  reason, 
then,  for  boldness,  for  grasping  firmly  the  opportunity 
presented  by  Carton's  introduction,  but  it  troubled  him 
to  shyness  to  think  that  he  had  so  greatly  the  advantage 
of  her.  He  had  watched  her  for  three  hours  and  she 
hadn't  seen  him  yet.     It  seemed  to  him  unfair. 

His  first  impression,  as  her  dressing-room  door  opened 
to  Derek  and  he  looked  over  his  friend's  shoulder,  was  of 
cool  white  walls  and  chintz  hangings.  The  gilt  Empire 
chairs,  relics  of  a  forgotten  Rossiter  production,  which 
furnished  the  cell-like  room  as  if  it  were  a  great  lady's 
prison  de  luxe  in  b3'gone  France,  added  in  some  indefinable 
way  to  its  femininity.  The  hangings  bulged  disconcert- 
ingly over  clothing. 

In  his  stall  he  had  established  that  he  knew  her,  but  this 
seemed  too  abrupt  a  plunge  into  her  intimacy.  She  sat, 
with  her  back  to  him,  at  a  table  littered  with  mysteries, 
and  her  hair  hung  loosely  down  her  white  silk  dressing- 
gown.  He  turned  away,  with  burning  face,  only  to  find 
in  that  room  of  mirrors  no  place  to  which  to  turn.     Car- 


234  HEPPLESTALL'S 

ton,  that  lump  of  ice,  was  unaffected,  and  so  was  Mary 
herself  who  continued,  messily,  to  remove  grease-paint 
from  her  face  with  vaseline  and  a  vigorous  towel  while  she 
gave  Carton,  sideways,  an  oily  hand.  She  was  not  incom- 
moding herself  for  a  man  she  hardly  remembered. 

"Weren't  there  two  of  you  when  you  came  in?"  she 
afsked  and  Derek  realized  that  Rupert  had  fled.  "Fairy  !'* 
he  called,  and  opened  the  door.     "Come  in,  man." 

Mary  laughed.  "Fairj?"  she  said.  "You've  a  quaint 
name.     Fairy  by  name  and  nature.     Fairies  disappear." 

He  was  distressingly  embarrassed.  Carton  had,  merely 
instinctively,  called  him  by  the  usual  nickname,  and  was 
he,  to  escape  her  gay  quizzing,  to  draw  himself  up  grandly 
and  to  say  that  he  wasn't  Fairy  but  Sir  Rupert? 
"Fairy"  set  her  first  impressions  against  him,  but  to  at- 
tempt their  correction  by  announcing  that  he  had  a  title 
might,  by  its  pompousness,  only  turn  bad  to  worse. 
Better,  for  the  moment,  let  it  slide.  He  smiled  gallantly. 
"When  I  disappear  again,"  he  said,  "it  will  be  because  you 
tell  me  to."  He  cursed  his  unreadiness  to  rise  above  the 
level  of  idioc3\ 

"Do  you  know.  Miss  Arden,  Fairy  comes  from  Lan- 
cashire," said  Derek,  by  way  of  magnanimously  helping 
a  lame  dog  over  a  stile. 

"Does  he?"  said  Mary  listlessly.  She  could  see  in  her 
glass  without  turning  round  his  large  supple  frame  and 
his  handsome  face  which  would,  she  thought,  look  better 
without  the  conventional  mustache.  She  placed  men 
quickly  now.  W^ell-bred,  this  boy,  gentle.  Too  gentle? 
Probably  not.  Big  men  were  apt  to  be  gentle  through 
very  consciousness  of  strength,  and  he  was  graceful  for  all 
his  size.  "Fairy"  would  do:  decidedly  he  would  do  to 
replace  as  her  decorative  companion  across  restaurant 
tables  her  latest  cavalier  who  had  just  gone  back  to 
France. 


THE  DREAM  IN  STONE  235 

"Oh,"  he  was  saying,  "it  won't  interest  Miss  Arden  that 
I  come  from  Lancashire." 

"Well,"  she  said,  hinting  a  gulf  impassable  between 
North  and  South,  "I'm  a  London  actress." 

"That's  the  miracle  of  it,"  he  said.  "Lancashire's  an 
old  slag-heap  of  a  county  and  one  couldn't  be  proud  of  it. 
Only,  by  Jove,  I  am,  since  hearing  you.  It's  queer,  but 
when  you  spoke  Lancashire  it  was  as  if  I  met  an  old  friend 
I  hadn't  seen  for  a  long  time.  I  know  it's  awful  cheek. 
Miss  Arden,  but  it  seemed  to  put  me  on  an  equality  with 
you." 

She  did  not  know  he  was  a  Hepplestall,  she  missed  the 
poignant  irony  of  their  identities,  but  when  Sir  Rupert 
haltingly  told  her  that  it  was  "awful  cheek"  in  him  to  feel 
on  an  equality  with  the  exalted  Mary  Ellen  Bradshaw, 
she  had,  unusually,  the  thought  that  she  ought  to  check 
this  absurd  diffidence  by  blurting  out  that  she  learned  her 
Lancashire  on  Staithley  Streets,  that  she  was  not  acting 
but  was  the  real,  raw  thing.  It  was  not  often,  these  days, 
that  Mary  blushed  to  accept  homage.  She  hadn't  put 
herself,  the  times,  the  strange  perverted  times,  had  put 
her  on  a  pinnacle  and,  being  there,  she  did  what  men 
seemed  gratified  that  she  should  do,  she  looked  down  on 
them.  But  because  she  kept  her  head,  she  had  not  re- 
sented, she  had  welcomed,  the  one  or  two  occasions  when 
she  had  been  made  to  feel  ashamed.  There  was  a  man, 
now  dead,  whom  she  recalled  because  Rupert  was  making 
her  in  the  same  way  look  at  herself  through  a  diminishing- 
glass.  He  had,  unlike  the  most,  talked  to  her  of  the 
things  they  were  doing  over  there:  he  had  told  her  in  a 
matter-of-fact  way  of  their  daily  life"  and  she  had  made 
comparisons  with  hers,  she  had  dwindled  to  her  true  di- 
mensions. And  Rupert  by  means  she  couldn't  analyze 
was  -giving  a  similar,  salutary  experience.  She  felt 
shrunken  before  him  and  was  happy  to  shrink. 


236  HEPPLESTALL'S 

Derek's  formula  for  the  correct  welcome  of  a  fighting 
soldier  on  leave  included  supper  at  a  night  club,  and  they 
were  wasting  time  on  the  impossible  woman.  "I  expect 
you  want  to  turn  us  out  so  that  you  can  dress,"  he  cut  in. 

"Oh!"  cried  Rupert,  alarmed  at  the  idea  of  going  so 
pat  upon  their  coming.  "But — yes,  I  suppose  you  must. 
Only  I — "  he  took  courage,  if  it  wasn't  desperation,  in 
both  hands  and  added,  "Will  you  lunch  with  me  to-morrow 
at  the  Carlton?" 

She  pretended  to  consult  a  full  engagement-book.  "I 
might  just  manage  it,"  she  grudged  defensively.  Though 
he  shrank  her  and  she  realized  being  shrunk  by  him,  he 
was  not  to  think  that  lunch  with  Mary  Arden  was  less 
than  a  high  pri\'ilege. 

He  took  tliat  view  himself.  "I  shall  be  greatly 
honored,"  he  said  sincerely:  then  Derek  hustled  him 
away,  but  not  to  the  night  club.  Rupert  resisted  that 
anti-climax,  he  who  had  held  Mary's  hand  in  his.  "But 
I*m  so  grateful  to  you,  Derek,"  he  emphasized. 

*'Are  you  ?  Then  don't  be  ungrateful  if  I  tell  you  that 
no  one's  quite  sane  on  leave,"  and  sane  or  not,  Rupert 
went  to  bed  in  the  elated  mood  of  a  man  who  knows  he 
has  created  something.  "Like  a  hen  clucking  over  an 
^SS***  ^*^  Derek's  private  comment  on  his  friend. 


CHAPTER  Vn 


MAEY    AND   EUPEET 


RUPERT  lay  in  bed  morosely  contemplating  the  first 
fact  about  Leave — its  brutal  elasticity.  If  he  did 
not  know,  on  the  one  hand,  what  he  had  done  to  deserve 
the  acquaintanceship  of  Mary  Arden,  he  did  not  know, 
on  the  other,  that  he  deserved  that  dark  intrusion  on  brief 
London  days,  the  Staithley  visit.  Fortune  first  smiled, 
then  apishly  grimaced,  but  he  threw  off  peevishness  with 
the  bed-clothes  and  the  tang  of  cold  water.  Soberly,  if 
intrusion  was  in  question,  then  it  was  Mary  who  intruded 
and  if  he  hadn't  learned,  by  now,  to  take  things  as  they 
came,  he  had  wasted  his  time  in  France. 

He  must  go  to  Staithley,  he  must  attend  the  conclave 
of  the  Hepplestalls,  but  he  need  not  then  and  there  make 
his  protest  articulate.  Would  it,  indeed,  be  decent,  com- 
ing as  he  would  straight  from  his  first  reverent  visit  to  his 
father's  grave,  to  fling  defiance  at  his  uncles?  If  they 
cared  to  read  consent  into  an  attitude  studiously  non- 
committal, why,  they  must;  but  he  wouldn't  in  so  many 
words  announce  his  irrevocable  decision  never  to  be  bonds- 
man to  Hepplestall's ;  he  wouldn't  by  any  sign  of  his  in- 
vite a  tedium  of  disputation  which  might  keep  him,  heaven 
knew  how  long,  from  London  and  his  Mary. 

His  Mary  !  That  was  thought  which  outran  discretion, 
truth  ajid  even  hope.  The  most  he  sanguinely  expected  of 
her  was  that  she  would  consent,  for  the  period  of  his  leave, 
to  "play"  with  him  and,  of  course,  there  was  a  matter, 

237 


238  HErPLESTALL'S 

trivial  but  annoying,  to  be  set  right  first.  That  intro- 
duction under  his  nickname  bothered  him :  his  silence  sug- 
gested that  he  was  ashamed  to  acknowledge  himself  at 
the  moment  of  being  presented  to  an  actress,  and  the  sug- 
gestion was  insulting  to  her.  So  far,  and  so  far  as  the 
invitation  to  lunch  went,  she  had  accepted  him  as  her  com- 
panion "on  his  face,"  and  it  might  have  been  romantic 
enterprise  to  see  if  she  would  continue  to  consort  with  a 
Fairy,  a  man  cursed  with  a  name  as  grotesque  as  C3'rano's 
nose,  but  he  took  Mary  too  seriously  to  put  their  play- 
time in  jeopardy  by  keeping  up  a  masquerade.  The  last 
thing  he  would  do  was  to  traffic  on  his  title,  but  the  first 
was  to  let  her  know  that  he  wasn't  a  Fair}' !  By  telling  a 
waiter  to  address  him  as  Sir  Rupert?  He  didn't  like 
that  way.  The  way  of  an  intriguer.  No,  he  must  face 
his  dilemma,  hoping  to  find  means  to  bring  out  the  truth 
without  (God  forbid!)  advertising  it,  and  in  the  first  mo- 
ments of  their  meeting,  too. 

What  prevented  him  from  telling  her  when  she  came 
into  the  restaurant  and  held  out  her  hand  with  an  *'Ah, 
Captain  Fairy,"  was  her  disconcerting  frock.  It  was  not 
an  unusual  frock  except  that  it  was  a  fashionable  and 
supreme  frock  and  Mary  had  torn  off  two  other  fashion- 
able frocks  before  she  decided  that  this  was  an  occasion 
for  a  supreme  frock.  It  was  an  occasion,  she  admitted 
by  stages  marked  by  the  change  of  frock,  for  her  best  de- 
fenses. She  had  welcomed  medicinally  the  purge  to  pride 
he  had  unconsciously  administered  but  he  must  not  make 
a  habit  of  it  and  from  head  to  foot,  within  and  without, 
she  wrapped  herself  in  dress-assurance. 

*'You're  stunning,"  he  said  at  sight  of  her,  stupidly 
and  truthfully,  missing  the  finer  excellences  of  her  frock, 
disconcerted  by  it  simply  because  it  was  a  frock.  Idiot, 
he  called  himself,  did  he  expect  her  to  come  to  the  Carlton 
in   a  white   silk  dressing-gown   with  her   hair  down    her 


MARY  AND  RUPERT  239 

shoulders?  But  neither  on  the  stage  nor  in  her  dressing- 
room  had  he  seen  her  with  her  hair  up  and  he  hadn't,  in 
that  particular,  been  imaginative  about  her.  He  saw  her 
now  a  well-dressed  woman,  superbly  a  woman,  but  so  dif- 
ferent from  the  Mary  of  stage-costume  or  of  dishabille, 
so  wonderfully  more  mysterious,  that  his  illusion  of  know- 
ing her  very  soul  dropped  from  him  and  left  him  bankrupt 
of  confidence  in  the  presence  of  a  lady  charming  but  un- 
known. 

They  were  at  a  table  and  Mary  had  the  conversation 
under  control  long  before  he  realized  that  she  was  still 
addressing  him  as  Captain  Fairy.  Perhaps,  after  all, 
his  assertion  of  himself  would  go  best  with  the  coffee:  he 
resolved  very  firmly  that  he  wouldn't  let  it  slide  beyond  the 
coffee.  He  became  aware  of  subtle  oppositions  between 
them,  of  pleasant  undercurrents  in  action  and  reaction 
making  an  electricity  of  their  own;  he  sensed  her  evident 
desire  to  lead  the  conversation.  Well,  she  would  natu- 
rally play  first  fiddle  to  a  Fairy,  but  perhaps  there  was 
something  else  and,  if  so,  he  could  put  that  right  without 
embarrassing  himself.  She  had  said  last  night,  as  if 
pointedly,  "I'm  a  London  actress,"  thinking  of  him,  no 
doubt,  as  a  provincial. 

He  said,  "By  the  way.  Carton  mentioned  last  night  that 
I  come  from  Lancashire.  His  point  was,  I  suppose,  that 
it  would  interest  you  because  you  happen  to  be  playing  a 
Lancashire  part.  I'm  Lancashire  by  the  accident  of 
birth,  but  I  hope  I've  outlived  it  in  my  life." 

"Oh!"  said  Mary,  thinking  of  a  photograph  of  Staith- 
ley  Edge  which  hung  on  the  wall  of  her  flat  almost  with 
the  significance  of  the  ikon  in  a  Russian  peasant's  room, 
*'oh,  are  you  ashamed  of  Lancashire?" 

"I'm  going  there  this  afternoon,  as  a  matter  of  fact, 
probably  for  the  last  time.  I  don't  think  the  word  is 
*ashamed,'  though.     I've  outgrown  Lancashire.     I   shall 


240  HEPPLESTALL'S 

settle  in  London  after  the  war.  Look  here,  may  I  tell  you 
about  it?  Theoretically,  I  was  supposed  to  go  back  to 
Lancashire  some  day,  after  I'd  finished  at  Cambridge. 
To  go  back  on  terms  I  loathed,  and  I  didn't  mean  to  go 
back.  I  was  reading  pretty  hard  at  Cambridge,  not  for 
fun,  but  to  get  a  degree — a  decent  degree;  to  have  some- 
thing to  wave  in  their  faces  as  a  fairly  solid  reason  for  not 
going  back.  I  thought  of  going  to  the  bar,  just  by  way 
of  being  something  reasonable,  but  I  don't  know  that  it 
matters  now.  I  mean  after  the  war  they  can't  possibly 
expect  the  things  of  a  man  that  they  thought  it  was  pos- 
sible, and  I  didn't,  to  expect  before.  My  father's  dead, 
too,  since  then.  And  that  makes  a  lot  of  difference.  I'm 
awfully  sorry  he  died,  but  I  can't  help  seeing  that  his 
death  liberates  me.  I  shan't  go  back  to  Lancashire  at 
any  price." 

He  had  the  earnest  fluency  of  a  man  talking  about  him- 
self to  a  woman.  How  well  she  knew  it!  And  how  old, 
how  wise,  how  much  more  experienced  than  the  oldest  war- 
scarred  veteran  of  tliem  all  did  she  not  feel  when  her 
young  men  poured  out  their  simple  liistories  to  her !  But 
she  was  used  to  the  form  of  consultation.  They  put  it  to 
her,  as  a  rule,  that  they  sought  her  advice  and  though 
she  knew  quite  well  that  their  object  was  to  flatter,  it 
piqued  her  now  that  Rupert  did  not  ask  advice.  He 
reasoned,  perhaps,  and  his  assertion  was  not  of  what  he 
would  do  after  the  war  but  of  what  he  positively  would 
not.  He  was  not  going  back  to  Lancashire  and,  "You 
do  pay  compliments,"  she  said  a  little  tartly.  "You  bring 
out  to  lunch  an  actress  who's  doing  a  Lancashire  part  and 
you  tell  her  that  Lancashire's  not  good  enough  for  you." 

"But  that's  your  art,"  he  cried,  "to  be  so  wonderfully 
not  yourself.  Seriously,  Miss  Arden,  for  you,  a  London 
actress,  to  be  absolutely  a  Lancashire  girl  on  the  stage  is 


MARY  AND  RUPERT  241 

sheer  miracle.  But  that's  not  the  question  and  between 
us  two,  is  Lancashire  a  place  fit  to  live  in?"  So  he 
bracketed  them  together,  people  of  the  great  world. 

"I  won't  commit  m^^self,"  she  said.  It  was  not  her  art, 
it  was  herself,  but  she  couldn't  answer  back  his  candor 
with  candor  of  her  own  and  felt  again  at  disadvantage 
with  him.  He  attacked  and  she  could  not  defend.  She 
said,  "Oh,  I  expect  you'll  get  what  you  want.  You  look 
the  sort  that  does."     She  was  almost  vicious  about  it. 

"I  hope  I  shall,"  he  said,  gazing  ingenuous  admiration 
at  her.     "For  instance — " 

She  moved  shai*ply  as  if  she  dodged  a  blow.  Men  did 
queer  things  on  leave;  she  had  had  proposals  from  them 
though  she  knew  them  as  little  as  she  knew  Rupert.  "For 
instance,"  he  went  on  imperviously,  "shall  I  get  this? 
Shall  I  get  your  promise  to  have  lunch  with  me  here  on 
Thursday?     I  shall  be  back  from  Lancashire  by  then." 

"Yes,  I'll  lunch,"  she  said  convulsively,  calling  herself 
a  fool  to  have  misjudged  him  and  a  soppy  fool,  like  the 
soppiest  fool  of  a  girl  at  the  theater,  to  be  so  apt  to  tliink 
of  marriage.  Yet  Mary  thought  much  of  marriage,  not 
as  the  "soppy  fools"  thought,  hopefully,  but  defensively. 
Marriage  did  not  march  with  her  dream  in  stone  and  the 
thought  of  Mary  Ellen  Bradshaw  on  Staithley  Edge. 
She  fought  always*  for  that  idea,  and  refusals  were  the 
trophies  she  had  won  in  her  campaigns  for  it,  usually  easy 
victories,  but  once  or  twice  she  had  not  found  it  easy  to 
refuse.  Did  Rupert  jeopardize  the  dream?  She  couldn't 
say  and,  thank  God,  she  needn't  say.  He  hadn't  asked 
her,  but  she  admitted  apprehension,  she  confessed  that  he 
belonged  with  those  very  few  who  had  made  her  dream 
appear  a  bleak  and  empty  thing.  This  man  disturbed  her : 
she  was  right  to  be  on  her  guard,  to  bristle  in  defense  of 
her  dream  at  the  least  sign  of  passion  in  him.     But  she 


242  HEPPLESTALL'S 

despised  herself  for  bristling  unnecessarily,  for  Imagining 
a  sign  which  wasn't  there.  He  had,  confoundedly,  the 
habit  of  making  her  despise  herself. 

Then  it  happened,  not  what  she  had  feared  would  hap- 
pen but  something  even  more  disturbing. 

"Ah,"  he  said  gayly,  "then  that's  a  bet.  That's  some- 
thing to  look  forward  to  while  I'm  at  Staithley." 

Staithley!  Staithley !  It  rang  in  her  brain.  Stam- 
mering she  spoke  it.     "Staithley  !" 

"Yes,"  he  said.  "It's  a  Lancashire  town.  I  don't  sup- 
pose you've  ever  heard  of  it,  but  my  people,  well,  we're 
rather  big  pots  up  there." 

"In  Staithley?"  she  repeated. 

"Yes.  We're  called  Hepplestall."  He  looked  at  her 
guiltily.  Mary's  teeth  were  clenched  and  her  bloodless 
hands  gripped  the  table  hard,  but  actress  twice  over, 
woman  and  Mary  Arden,  and  modern  with  cosmetics,  her 
face  showed  nothing  of  her  inward  storm.  "That  idiotic 
name  Carton  called  me  by — they  all  do  it,"  he  protested 
loyally.  "It's  odds  on  that  they've  forgotten  what  my 
real  name  is  but  I'm  Rupert  Hepplestall  really  and  .  .  . 
oh,  as  a  matter  of  form,  I'm  Sir  Rupert  Hepplestall.  I 
— I  can't  help  it,  you  know." 

One  didn't  make  a  scene  in  a  restaurant.  One  didn't 
scream  in  a  restaurant.  One  didn't  go  into  hysterics  in 
a  restaurant.  That  was  all  she  consciously  thought, 
clutching  the  table  till  it  seemed  the  veins  in  her  fingers 
must  burst.  Hepplestall — and  she.  And  Mary  Ellen 
Bradshaw.  Lunching  together.  Oh,  it — but  she  was 
thinking  and  she  must  not  think.  She  must  repeat,  over 
and  over  again,  "One  does  not  make  a  scene,  one — " 

Immensely  surprised  she  heard  herself  say,  "No,  you 
can't  help  it,"  and  as  she  saw  him  smile — the  smile  of  a 
schoolboy  who  is  "let  off"  a  peccadillo — she  concluded 
that  she  must  have  smiled  at  him. 


MARY  AND  RUPERT  243 

"I'm  better  now  I've  got  that  off  my  chest,"  he  said. 
*'I  had  to  do  it  before  we  parted  though,  by  George,  I've 
cut  it  fine."  There  are  several  ways,  besides  the  right 
way,  of  looking  at  a  wrist-watch.  She  was  annoyed  to 
find  herself  capable  of  noticing  that  Rupert's  was  the 
right  way.  *'I  shall  have  to  dash  for  my  train.  Where 
can  I  put  you  down?  I  must  go  now:  I'll  apologize  on 
Thursday  for  abruptness." 

"I'm  going  to  the  flat,"  she  said.  "Baker  Street."  He 
was  paying  the  bill,  getting  his  cap  and  stick,  urging  pace 
on  the  taxi-driver,  busy  in  too  many  ways  to  be  observant 
of  Mary. 

"Hepplestall,"  she  thought  going  up  her  stairs,  "Hep- 
plestall,  and  I've  to  act  to-night."     Her  bed  received  her. 

Incongruous  in  youth  and  khaki  he  sat  abashed  amongst 
black-coated  elders  of  the  sei'vice  at  the  board  of  Hepple- 
stall's.  He  wanted  urgently  to  scoff,  to  feel  that  it  all 
didn't  matter  because  nothing  mattered  but  the  war,  and 
they  set  the  war  in  a  perspective  new  to  him,  as  passing 
episode  reacting  certainly  upon  the  permanency,  Hepple- 
stall's,  but  reacting  temporarily  as  the  Cotton  Famine  had 
reacted  in  the  days  of  the  American  Civil  War. 

He  did  not  fail  to  perceive  the  significance  of  old 
Horace,  Sir  Philip's  uncle,  who  was  seventy,  with  fifty 
years  to  his  credit  of  leadership  in  the  Service,  a  living 
link  with  heaven  knew  what  remote  ancestors.  Perhaps 
old  Horace  in  his  youth  had  seen  the  Founder  himself. 
It  bridged  time,  it  was  like  shaking  hands  with  a  man  who 
had  been  patted  on  the  head  by  Wellington,  and,  like 
Horace,  Rupert  was  subjected  to  the  fact  of  being  Hep- 
plestall. The  law  of  his  people,  the  dour  and  stable  law, 
ran  unchangeable  by  time. 

Complacent  he  had  not  been  as  he  bared  his  head  be- 
fore  Sir  Philip's   grave,  but  he  had  kept  his   balance. 


244  HEPPLESTALL'S 

Death,  that  lay  outside  youth's  normal  thought  and  en- 
tered it  with  monstrousness,  was  Rupert's  known  familiar 
and  a  father  dead  could  sadden,  but  could  not  startle,  a 
soldier  who  had  seen  comrades  killed  at  his  side.  It 
touched  him,  quite  unselfishly,  to  think  that  Sir  Pliilip 
had  gone  knowing  him  not  as  rebel,  not  as  apostate  of 
the  Hepplestalls,  but  as  a  son  of  whom  he  could  be  proud 
— Rupert  the  cricketer,  the  solid  schoolboy  who  developed, 
unexpectedly  but  satisfactorily,  into  a  reading  man  at 
Cambridge,  and  then  the  soldier;  but  he  was  stirred  to 
other  and  far  deeper  feelings  by  the  references  made  at 
the  board  to  Sir  Philip.  They  were  not  formal  trib- 
utes, they  were  chatty  reminiscences  hitting  Rupert  the 
shrewder  because  there  was  nothing  conventional  about 
them,  bringing  home  to  the  son  how  his  father  had  seemed 
to  other  eyes  than  his.  How  little  he  had  known  Sir 
Philip!  How  carelessly  he'd  failed  in  his  appreciations! 
And  it  was  double-edged,  because  the  very  object  of  this 
meeting  was  to  salute  him  as  heir  to  the  chieftainship, 
implying  that  in  the  son  they  saw  a  successor  worthy  of  the 
father. 

They  even  apologized  to  him  for  having,  in  his  absence, 
appointed  an  interim  successor.  Sir  Philip's  death 
created  a  situation  unprecedented  in  the  history  of  the 
firm  because  never  before  had  the  Head  died  with  his  son 
unready  to  take  the  reins,  and  the  war  aggravated  the 
situation.  Rupert's  training  could  not  begin  till  the  war 
ended ;  it  would  be  many  years  before  he  took  his  place 
at  the  head  of  the  table.  Chairman  of  the  Board. 

Behind  the  training  they  underwent  was  the  theory  of 
the  machine  with  interchangeable  parts;  it  was  assumed 
that  the  general  technical  knowledge  they  all  acquired 
fitted  each  for  any  post  to  which  the  Service  might  ap- 
point him.  They  did  not  overrate  mere  technique  but 
they  relied  upon  the  quality  of  the  Hepplestalls.     If  oc- 


MARY  AND  RUPERT  245 

casion  called  a  Hepplestall,  he  rose  to  it.  This  occasion, 
the  occasion  of  a  regency,  had  called  William  Hepplestall, 
Sir  Philip's  brother  next  in  age  to  him. 

William  had  not  sought,  but  neither  did  he  shirk,  t!ie 
burden  of  responsibility.  "I  will  do  my  duty,"  he  had 
said.  "You  know  me.  I  am  not  an-  imaginative  man, 
and  the  times  are  difficult.     But  I  will  do  my  duty." 

It  would,  certainly,  not  have  occurred  to  William  in  the 
first  days  of  the  war  to  convert  their  Dye-House  from 
cotton  dyeing  to  woolen :  that  sort  of  march-  into  foreign 
territory,  so  extraordinarily  lucrative,  would  have  oc- 
curred to  none  but  to  Sir  Philip,  and  they  understood  very 
well  that  under  William-,  or  under  any  of  them  now,  the 
control  would  be  prudent  and  uninspired.  Thpy  looked  to 
Rupert  as  inheritor  cf  the  Hepplestall  tradition  of  in- 
spiration in  leadership.  Calmly  they  made  the  vast  as- 
sumption not  only  that  he  was  coming  to  them  but  that 
he  was  coming  to  be,  eventually,  a  leader  to  them  as  bril- 
liant as  Sir  Philip  had  been. 

*'I  shall  not  see  it,"  said  old  Horace,  "but  I  do  not  need 
to  see.     We  continue,  we  Hepplestalls ;  we  serve." 

Amiably,  implacably,  with  embarrassing  deference  to 
Sir  Philip's  son,  they  pinned  him  to  his  doom,  and  in 
France,  when  he  had  heard  of  this  meeting  they  arranged 
for  him,  he  had  thought  of  it  as  a  comic  interlude,  and 
of  himself  as  one  who  would  relax  from  great  affairs  to 
watch  these  little  men  at  play!  He  sat  weighed  down, 
in  misery.  In  London  he  had  decided  that  he  wouldn't 
argue,  but  he  hadn't  known  that  he  could  not  argue.  He 
was  oppressed  to  taciturnity,  to  speechless  sulking  which 
they  took,  since  Rupert  did  everything,  even  sulking, 
pleasantly,  to  mean  that  he  was  overv/helmed  by  the  re- 
newal, through  their  eulogies,  of  his  personal  grief  for  the 
loss  of  his  father.  They  spoke  tactfully  of  the  war,  de- 
ferring to  him  as  a  soldier ;  they  aimed  with  family  news 


246  HEPPLESTALL'S 

in  gossipy  vein  of  this  and  that  Hepplestall  in  and  out  of 
the  war,  to  put  him  at  liis  ease,  and  soon  the  meeting 
ended.  They  took  it  as  natural  that  he  wished  to  spend 
his  leave  in  London.  It  seemed  they  understood.  They 
advised  about  trains. 

Rupert  escaped,  miserable  because  he  was  not  elated  to 
leave  that  torture-chamber.  He  hadn't  faced  the  music. 
But  he  couldn't.  Altogether  apart  from  his  wish  to  get 
out  of  Staithley  at  the  first  possible  moment,  he  couldn't 
face  that  music.  Their  expectations  of  him  were  so  mas- 
sive, so  serene,  so  sure,  their  line  unbreakable. 

In  the  train,  he  recurred  to  that  thought  of  the  Hepple- 
stall line.  No:  he  could  not  break  it,  but  there  might 
be  a  way  round.  He  was  going  to  London,  where  Mary 
was,  and  the  point,  surely  the  point  about  the  training 
of  a  Hepplestall  was  that  they  caught  their  Hepplestalls 
young.  They  cozened  them  witli  the  idea  of  service  and 
sent  them,  willing  victims,  to  labor  with  their  hands  in 
Staithley  Mills — because  they  caught  them  young.  Ru- 
pert was  twenty-five.  Cynically  he  "placed"  that  meet- 
ing now:  it  was  a  super-cozening  addressed  to  a  Hepple- 
stall who  was  no  longer  a  bo}*:  it  admitted  his  age  and 
the  intolerable  indignities  the  training  held  for  a  man  of 
his  age,  for  a  captain  who  had  a  real  chance  of  becoming 
a  major  very  soon.  It  was  their  effort,  their  demonstra- 
tion, and  he  saw  his  way  to  make  an  effort  and  a  counter 
demonstration.  Clearly,  they  saw  that  it  wasn't  reason- 
able to  train  a  man  o.f  his  years  to  spinning  and  the  rest 
of  it;  then  they  would  see  the  absolute  impossibilit}'  of 
compelling  a  married  man  to  undergo  that  training.  A 
man  couldn't  leave  his  wife  at  some  Godless  early  morning 
hour  to  go  to  work  with  his  hands,  he  couldn't  come  home, 
work-stained,  after  a  day's  consorting  with  the  operatives, 
to  the  lady  who  was  Lady  Hepplestall. 

He  realized,  awed  by  his  presumptuousness,  that  he  was 


MARY  AND  RUPERT  247 

thinking  of  Mary  Arden  as  the  lady  who  was  Lady  Hep- 
plestall. 

He  thought  of  her  with  awe  because  he  was  not  seeing 
Mary  Arden,  musical  comedy  actress,  through  the  elderly 
eyes  of  his  uncles,  still  less  of  his  aunts,  but  from  the  angle 
of  our  soldiers  in  France  who  made  Mary  a  romantic 
symbol  of  the  girls  they  left  behind  them.  To  marry 
Mary  Arden  would  be  an  awfully  big  adventure. 

She  had  time,  while  he  was  at  Staithley,  to  come  to 
terms  with  his  disclosure.  In  the  restaurant,  when  it 
came  upon  her  suddenly,  it  had  sent  her,  certainly,  heels 
over  head,  but,  soberly  considered,  she  began  to  ask  her- 
self what  there  was  in  it  that  should  disconcert  her.  She 
was  Br'adshaw  and  he  a  Hepplestall  and  she  believed  that 
without  effort,  merely  by  not  discouraging  him,  she  could 
make  him  marry  her.  What  could  be  neater.?  What  re- 
venge more  exquisite  upon  the  Hepplestalls  than  Mary 
Ellen  Bradshaw,  Lady  Hepplestall? 

True — if  she  hated  them.  But  her  hatred,  reexamined, 
seemed  a  visionary  thing;  at  the  most  it  was  romantic 
decoration  to  a  fact  and  in  this  mood  of  inquisition  Mary 
sought  facts  without  their  trimmings.  She  sought  her 
hatred  of  the  Hepplestalls  and  found  she  had  no  hatred 
in  her. 

She  raised  her  eyes  to  the  photograph  of  Staithley 
Edge.  Yes,  that  was  authentic  feeling,  that  passion  for 
the  Staithley  hills,  but  she  didn't  want  to  go  there  in  order 
to  take  the  shine  out  of  the  Hepplestalls.  She  had  ro- 
manticized that  feeling,  she  had  made  hatred  the  excuse 
for  her  ambition,  so  arbitrary  in  an  actress  with  a  vogue, 
to  go  back  to  live  bleakly  amongst  smoke-tarnished  moors. 
Rupert,  for  instance,  was  firmly  set  against  return. 

It  was  deflating,  like  losing  a  diamond  ring,  and  she  did 
not  humble  herself  to  the  belief  that  the  diamond  had 


248  HEPPLESTALL'S 

never  been  there.  It  had,  in  the  clan-hatred  of  the  Brad- 
shaws,  but  she  had  been  stagey  about  it.  She  had  magni- 
fied a  childish  memory  into  a  living  vendetta  and,  scruti- 
nized to-day,  she  saw  it  as  a  tinsel  wrapping,  crumbling 
at  exposure  to  daylight,  round  her  sane  sweet  passion  for 
the  hills :  and  the  conclusion  was  that  Rupert  Hepple- 
stall  meant  no  more  to  her  than  Rupert  Fairy — or  little 
more.  She  had  mischief  enough  in  her  to  savor  the 
thought  of  Mary  Ellen  squired  in  London  by  Sir  Rupert 
Hepplestall  and  decided  that  if  he  wanted  to  take  his 
orders  from  her  for  the  period  of  his  leave,  she  would  take 
particular  pleasure  in  ordering  him  imperiously. 

She  calculated,  she  thought,  with  comprehensiveness, 
but  missed  two  factors,  one  (which  she  should  have  remem- 
bered) that  Rupert  had  seemed  lovable,  the  other  (which 
she  could  not  guess)  that  he  returned  from  Staithley  to 
begin  his  serious  wooing.  He  laid  siege  before  defenses 
which  she  had  deliberately  weakened  by  her  re-orientation 
of  her  facts. 

One  day,  before  he  must  go  back  to  France,  he  spoke 
outright  of  love.  If  he  hadn't,  half  a  dozen  times,  de- 
clared himself,  then  he  didn't  know  what  mute  announce- 
ment was,  but  leave  was  running  out  and  addressing  silent 
questions  to  a  sphinx  left  him  a  long  way  short  of  tangi- 
ble result. 

"Oh,  love!"  she  jeered.     "What's  love?" 

"I  can  tell  you  that,"  he  said,  "better  than  I  could  ten 
days  ago.  Love's  selfishness  a  deux.  I'm  one  of  the 
two  and  my  idea  of  love  is  finding  comfort  in  your  arms/* 

She  thought  it  a  good  answer,  so  good  that  it  brought 
her  to  her  feet  and  to  (they  were  in  her  flat)  the  drawer 
in  her  desk  where  she  had  hidden  a  photograph.  Holding 
it  to  him,  "Do  you  recognize  that?"  she  asked.  "The 
other  day,  when  we  were  talking,  I  said  I  had  no  people 
and—" 


MARY  AND  RUPERT  249 

"Was  that  mattering  before  the  war?  I'm  sure  it 
doesn't  matter  now,"  he  said. 

"And  this  photograph?" 

He  shook  his  head.     "It  might  be  any  hilL'* 

"But  it  is  StaitWey  Edge." 

For  a  moment  he  was  radiant.  "You  got  it,"  he 
glowed,  "because  of  me.'* 

"I  got  it  because  of  me.  Listen.  I'm  Mary  Arden, 
actress.  I'm  twenty-five  years  old  and  I'm  about  as  high 
as  any  one  can  get  in  musical  comedy.  I  began  in  the 
chorus,  but  I've  had  a  soft  passage  up  because  I  was 
pushed  by  an  agent  who  believed  in  me.  If  you  think  I'm 
more  than  that,  you're  wrong.  And  I'm  much  less  than 
that.     I  said  I  had  no  people,  and  it  isn't  true." 

"I  don't  want  to  know  about  your  people.  We're  you 
and  I.     We're  Mary  and  Rupert." 

"Yes.  But  we're  Mary  Bradshaw  and  Rupert  Hepple- 
stall."  With  that,  she  thought,  she  slaughtered  hope, 
not  his  alone  but  something  that  grew  in  her,  something 
she  was  thinking  of  as  hope  because  she  dared  not  think 
of  it  as  love.  Now  she  need  no  longer  think  of  it  at  all ; 
she  had  killed  it ;  she  had  met  his  candor  with  her  candor, 
she  had  announced  herself  a  Bradshaw.  It  was  the  death 
of  hope. 

Suffering  herself  but  compassionate  for  the  pain  she 
must  have  given  him,  she  raised  her  eyes  to  his.  And  the 
response  to  a  lady  martyring  herself  to  truth  was  an  in- 
dulgent smile  and  maddening  misapprehension.  "Is  there 
anything  in  that?  Bradshaw  instead  of  Arden?  Surely 
it's  usual  to  have  a  stage-name.'* 

"You  haven't  understood.  When  I  pretend  to  be  Lan- 
cashire on  the  stage,  I  don't  pretend.     Is  that  clear?" 

It  irked  him  that  he  couldn't  say,  "As  mud."  She  was 
too  passionately  in  earnest  for  him  to  dare  the  flippancies. 
He  said,  "Yes,  that's  clear.'* 


250  HEPPLESTALL'S 


« 


'And  Staithley  in  particular.  I'm  Staithley  bom  and 
bred.  Bred,  I'm  telling  you,  in  Staithley  Streets.  My 
name's  Bradshaw." 

He  lashed  his  memory,  aware  dimly  that  Bradshaw  had 
associations  for  him  other  than  the  railway-guide.  It 
was  coming  to  him  now.  The  Staithley  Bradshaws,  that 
sixteenth  birthday  interview  with  his  father,  his  own  dis- 
paraging of  Tom  Bradshaw  and  Sir  Philip's  defense  of 
him.  His  father  had  been  right,  too.  Tom  was  in  some 
office  under  the  Coalition,  pulling  his  weight  like  all  the 
rest.  The  war  had  proved  his  sportsmanship,  as  it  had 
everybody's.  He  hadn't  a  doubt  that  any  of  the  Staith- 
ley Bradshaws  who  were  in  the  army  were  splendid 
soldiers. 

In  the  ranks,  though. 

One  thought  twice  about  marrying  their  sister.  He 
wished  she  hadn't  told  him,  and  as  he  wished  it  she  was 
emphasizing,  "I'm  from  the  Begging  Bradshaws.'* 

He  forced  a  smile.  *'You're  a  long  way  from  them, 
then,"  he  said,  and  she  agreed  on  that. 

"Oh,  yes,"  she  said,  "I'm  eight  years  from  them.  I 
don't  know  them  and  they  don't  know  me.  I'm  Mary 
Arden  to  every  one  but  you :  only  when  you  say  your  idea 
of  love  is  finding  comfort  in  my  arms,  I  had  to  tell  you 
just  whose  arms  they  are.  I'm  Bradshaw  and  I've  sung 
for  pennies  in  the  Staithley  Streets." 

Some  of  the  implications  he  did  not  perceive  at  once, 
but  he  saw  the  one  that  mattered.  His  sphinx  had  spoken 
now.  She  "had"  to  tell  him,  and  there  were  only  two 
reasons  why.  The  first  was  that  she  loved  him,  and  the 
second  was  that  she  was  honest  in  her  love — "Mary,"  he 
said,  "you'll  marry  me." 

"No." 

*'If  you  want  arguments  about  a  thing  that's  settled, 
I'll  give  you  them,"  he  said.     "You  don't  know  what  a 


MARY  AND  RUPERT  251 

gift  you've  brought  me.     You  don't  know  how  magnifi- 
cently it  suits  me  that  you're  Bradshaw." 

"Suits  you!"  she  cried  incredulously,  and  he  told  her 
why  of  all  the  things  she  might  have  been  she  was  the  one 
which  definitely  wiped  out  all  possibility  of  his  return  to 
Staithley.  They  couldn't  force  him  there  with  a  Brad- 
shaw for  his  wife,  they  would  be  the  first  to  cry  out  that 
it  wouldn't  do:  she  was  his  master-card,  Mary,  whom  he 
loved;  she  was  Mary  Arden  and  tremendously  a  catch; 
she  was  Mary  Bradshaw,  his  sure  defense  against  the  rigid 
expectations  of  the  Hepplestalls  and  ...  oh,  uncounted 
things  besides.  "And  I  apologize,"  he  said,  "I  apologize 
for  arguing,  for  dragging  in  the  surrounding  circum- 
stance. But  you  tell  me  you're  Bradshaw  as  if  it  unmade 
us  and  I  tell  you  it's  the  best  touch  in  the  making  of  us." 

She  wasn't  sure  of  that.  She  was  idiosyncratic  and 
peculiar  herself  in  wishing  to  go  back  to  Staithley,  but  she 
felt  that  her  dream,  though  she  had  stripped  it  of  roman- 
tic hate,  yet  stood  for  something  sounder  than  his  mere 
obstinate  refusal  to  return.  He  left  himself  in  air ;  he  was 
a  negative;  rejecting  Staithley,  he  had  no  plans  of  what 
he  was  to  do  after  the  war. 

But  that  was  to  prejudge  him,  it  was  certainly  to  cal- 
culate, and  she  had  calculated  too  much  in  her  life.  Cau- 
tion be  hanged !     There  was  a  place  for  wUdness. 

They  would  say,  of  course,  that  she  was  marrying  for 
position.  Let  them  say:  she  would,  certainly,  be  Lady 
Hepplestall,  but  at  what  a  discount !  To  be  Lady  Hep- 
plestall  and  not  to  live  in  Lancashire,  in  the  one  place 
where  the  significance  of  being  Hepplestall  was  grasped  in 
full !  It  was  like  marrying  a  king  in  exile,  it  was  like  re- 
ceiving a  rope  of  pearls  upon  condition  that  she  never 
wore  them.  It  excluded  the  pungent  climax  of  Mary 
Ellen  as  Mistress  of  Staithley  Hall. 

Her  dream  had  set,  indeed,  in  a  painted  sky,  but  she 


252  HEPPLESTALL'S 

would  not  linger  in  gaze  upon  its  afterglow;  she  was  not 
looking  at  sunset  but  at  dawn,  and  raised  her  eyes  to  his. 
She  discovered  that  she  was  being  kissed.  She  had  the 
sensation,  ecstatic  and  poignant,  surrendering  and  trium- 
phant, of  being  kissed  by  the  man  she  loved. 

She  had  not,  hitherto,  conceived  a  high  opinion  of  kiss- 
ing. On  the  stage  and  off,  it  was  a  professional  conven- 
tion, fractionally  more  expressive  than  a  handshake. 
This  was  radically  different ;  this  was,  tinglingly,  vividly, 
to  feel,  to  be  aware  of  herself  and,  through  their  lips,  of 
him.  She  had  the  exaltation  of  the  giver  who  gives  with- 
out reserve,  and  from  up  there,  bemused  in  happiness, 
star-high  with  Rupert's  kiss  and  her  renunciations,  she  fell 
through  space  when  he  unclasped  her  and  said  with  brisk 
assurance,  "Engagement  ring  before  lunch.  License  after 
lunch.     That's  a  reasonable  program,  isn't  it?" 

Perhaps  it  was  reasonable  to  a  time-pressed  man  whose 
leave  could  now  be  counted  by  the  hour.  Perhaps  she 
hadn't  seen  that  there  is  only  one  first  kiss.  It  came,  and 
no  matter  what  the  sequel  held,  went  lonely,  unmatched, 
unique.  What  passion-laden  words  could  she  expect  from 
him  to  lengthen  a  moment  that  was  gone? 

It  wasn't  he  who  was  failing  her,  it  was  herself  who 
must,  pat  upon  their  incomparable  moment,  be  criticizing 
him  because  he  was  not  miraculous  but  practical.  And 
this  was  thought,  a  sickly  thing,  when  her  business  was  to 
feel,  it  was  opposition  when  her  business  was  surrender. 
The  wild  thing  was  tlie  right  thing  now.  She  purged  her- 
self of  thought. 

"Yes,"  she  said.  She  was  to  marry.  Marry.  And 
then  he  would  go  back  to  France ;  but  iSrst  he  was  to  find 
comfort  in  her  arms. 


CHAPTER  VIII 


THE    REGENCY 


THE  rigorous  theory  that  a  Hepplestall  vzas  Instantly 
prepared  at  the  word  of  command  to  go  to  the  ends 
of  the  earth  in  the  interests  of  the  firm  was,  in  practice, 
softened  by  expediency.  They  did  not,  for  instance,  re- 
call their  manager  at  Calcutta  or  Rio  and  expect  him  to 
fill  a  home  berth  as  aptly  as  a  man  who  had  not  spent  half 
a  lifetime  in  familiarizing  himself  with  special  foreign  con- 
ditions ;  they  used  their  man-power  with  discretion  and 
humanity,  and  there  seemed  nothing  harsh  in  expecting 
William  Hepplestall,  chief  of  their  Manchester  offices,  to 
remove  to  Staithley  when  he  became  the  acting  Head. 

William  was  a  man  who,  in  other  circumstances,  would 
have  deserved  the  epithet  "worthy,"  perhaps  with  its 
slightly  mocking  significance  emphasized  by  a  capital  W. 
A  "Worthy"  has  solid  character  bounded  by  parochial 
imagination ;  and  William  rose,  but  only  by  relentless 
effort,  to  thinking  in  the  wide-world  terms  of  trade  imposed 
upon  the  chief  of  Hepplestall's  Manchester  warehouse. 
He  was  masterly  in  routine;  under  Sir  Philip,  a  trusted 
executant  of  that  leader's  conceptions ;  and  since  he  bore 
his  person  with  great  dignity,  he  cut  a  figure  ambassa- 
dorial, impressive,  fit  representative  in  Manchester  of  the 
Hepplestalls  who  took  the  view  of  that  city  that  it  was  an 
outpost — their  principal  outpost — of  Staithley  Bridge. 

Probably  Sir  Philip,  had  he  been  alive,  v.ould  have  pre- 

253 


254  HEPPLESTALL'S 

vented  William's  promotion ;  but  Sir  Philip  had  died  sud- 
denly, without  chance  to  nominate  a  successor  who,  most 
likely,  would  have  been  unobvious  and,  most  certainly,  the 
best.  And  even  Sir  Philip  would  have  saluted  ungrudg- 
ingly the  spirit,  humble  yet  resolute,  in  which  William  ac- 
cepted his  responsibility.  The  Board,  weakened  in  per- 
sonnel by  the  war,  did,  as  Boards  do,  the  obvious  thing, 
and  were  very  well  satisfied  with  the  wisdom  of  their 
choice. 

What  they  did  not  understand,  what  William  himself 
did  not  foresee,  was  that  his  difficulties  were  to  be  in- 
creased by  the  conduct  of  his  wife.  Mrs.  William  had 
failed  to  realize  that  in  marrying  William  she  married  a 
Service.  She  thought  she  married  the  head  of  Hepple- 
stall's  Manchester  offices  and  that  she  had,  as  a  result, 
her  position  in  Manchester  and  her  distinguished  home  in 
Alderley  Edge,  which  is  almost  a  rural  suburb  and,  also, 
the  seat  of  a  peer.  Short  of  living  in  London,  to  which 
she  had  vague  aspirations  when  William  retired,  she  was 
very  well  content  with  her  degree ;  and  the  news  that  she 
was  expected  to  uproot  herself  and  to  live  in  Staithley 
came  as  a  startling  assault  on  settled  prepossessions. 
While  she  hadn't  the  challenging  habit  of  asserting  that 
she  was  of  Manchester  and  proud  of  it,  she  knew  the  dif- 
ference between  Manchester,  where  one  could  pretend  one 
was  not  provincial,  and  Staitliley,  where  no  such  pretense 
was  possible,  and  it  was  vainly  that  William  told  her  of 
Lady  Hepplestall's  offer  to  leave  the  Hall  in  their  favor. 
Sir  Philip's  widow  knew,  if  Mrs.  William  didn't,  what  was 
incumbent  on  a  Hepplcstall. 

"In  other  words,  we're  to  be  caretakers  for  Rupert,"  she 
said.  "What  will  become  of  my  Red  Cross  committee 
work  here?" 

William  suggested  that  by  using  the  car  she  need  be 
cut  off  from  none  of  her  activities.     "But  I'm  to  live  down 


THE  REGENCY  255 

there,"  she  snid,  "decentralized,  in  darkest  Lancashire," 
and  she  had  her  alternative.  If  the  firm  required  this  ir- 
rational sacrifice  of  William's  wife,  he  had  surely  his  reply 
that  he  was  rich  enough  to  retire  and  would  retire  with 
her,  to  London.  Her  friend,  Lady  Duxbury,  was  already 
preparing  to  move  to  London  after  the  Mar ;  the  William 
Hepplestalls  could  moA^e  now.  They  were  forced  to  move 
now. 

"It  is  not  a  question  of  being  rich  enough  to  retire," 
he  said.  "No  doubt  I  am  that ;  but  I  am  an  able-bodied 
servant  of  the  firm.  We  Hepplestalls  do  not  retire  while 
we  are  capable  of  service," 

She  had  never  thought  liim  so  dull  a  dog  before;  she 
whistled  at  the  obligations  of  the  Service,  and  she  exagger- 
ated the  influence  of  a  wife  which  persuades  in  propor- 
tion as  it  is  ventured  sparingly,  seasonabl}'^,  and  with  due 
regard  to  the  example  of  pig-drivers  who,  when  they  would 
have  their  charges  go  to  the  left,  make  a  feint  of  driving 
them  to  the  right. 

Sir  Ralph  Duxbury  is  younger  than  you,"  she  argued, 
and  he's  retiring  at  the  end  of  the  war.     They're  going 
to  London  to  enjoy  life  before  they're  too  old." 

"Duxbury,"  said  William  severely,  "is  a  war-profiteer. 
His  future  plans  tally  with  his  present." 

"Oh,  how  can  you  say  that  of  your  friend?" 

"I  can  say  it  of  most  of  my  friends.  But  you  would 
hardly  suggest  that  it  is  true  of  me.  You  would  hardly 
put  the  case  of  a  Hepplestall  on  all  fours  with  the  case  of 
a  Duxbury." 

She  did  suggest  it.  *'But  surely  you  are  all  in  business 
to  make  money !" 

*'My  dear,"  he  said,  with  dignified  rebuke,  "I  am  a  Hep- 
plestall," and  left  it,  without  more  argument,  at  that. 
He  knew  no  cure  for  eyes  which  saw  no  difference  between 
the  Service  and  the  nimble  men  who  had  thriven  by  the 


256  HEPPLESTALL'S 

mushroom  trades  of  temporary  war-contractors.  "And 
we  go  to  Staithley." 

If  it  was  a  matter  of  capitulations,  he  had  his  own  to 
make  in  liis  disappearance  from  Manchester,  his  familiar 
scene.  The  Head  of  Hepplestalls  made  no  half-and-half 
business  of  it,  dividing  his  days  between  the  mills,  the  Man- 
chester office  and  the  Manchester  Exchange.  He  left 
others  to  cut  a  figure  on  'Change  and  to  hold  court  in 
the  offices.  His  place  was  at  the  source,  at  the  mills,  a 
standard-bearer  of  the  cotton  trade,  a  manufacturer  first 
and  a  salesman  and  distributor  only  b^'  proxy.  It  meant, 
for  William,  tlie  change  in  the  habits  of  half  a  lifetime, 
the  end  of  his  pleasant  Cheshire  Countjv^  associations  at 
Alderley,  the  end  of  his  lunches  in  his  club  in  Manchester, 
and,  so  far,  he  could  have  sympathized  with  Gertrude  if 
only  she  hadn't,  by  the  violence  of  her  expression,  driven 
him  hotl}'^  to  resent  her  view. 

She  called  it  "darkest  Lancashire" — Staithley,  the 
Staithley  of  the  Hepplestalls !  "Caretakei's  for  Rupert !" 
There  was  truth  in  that,  though  the  caretaking,  by  reason 
of  the  war  and  because  when  the  war  ended  Rupert  had 
still  to  begin  at  the  beginning,  would  last  ten  years  and 
(confound  Gertrude),  couldn't  she  see  what  it  meant  to 
William  that  he  was  going  to  live  and  to  have  his  children 
live  in  Staithley  Hall  where  he  had  spent  his  boyhood.'' 
Caretakers !  They  were  all  caretakers,  they  were  all 
trustees.  Above  all,  he,  William,  was  Head  of  Hepple- 
stall's  and  his  wife  had  so  little  appreciation  of  the  glory 
that  was  his  as  to  be  captious  about  the  trivial  offsets. 

The  responsibility,  heaven  knew,  was  heavy  enough 
without  Gertrude's  adding  to  it  this  galling  burden  of  her 
discontent,  but,  though  she  submitted,  it  was  never  grace- 
fully. She  went  to  Staithley  determined  that  their  time 
there  should  be  short,  that  she  would  lose  no  opportunity 


THE  REGENCY  257 

to  press  for  his  retirement;  but  she  had  learned  the  need 
of  subtlety.  She  had  found  her  William  a  malleable  hus- 
band, but  there  were  hard  places  in  the  softest  men  and 
here  was  one  of  them  not  to  be  negotiated  easilj  or 
hurriedly,  but  by  a  gentle  tactfulness.  Perhaps  she  knew, 
better  than  he  knew  himself,  tliat  there  was  no  granite  in 
him. 

She  reminded  him,  not  every  day  or  every  week,  but 
sufficiently  often  to  show  that  she  did  not  relent,  of  her 
hatred  of  Staithley.  She  had  the  wisdom  not  to  criticize 
the  Hall — indeed  she  couldn't,  even  when  she  flogged  re- 
sentment, disrelish  that  aging  place  of  mellow  beauty — 
but,  "If  it  were  anywhere  but  at  Staithley !"  she  cried 
with  wearying  monotony,  and  in  a  score  of  ways  she  made 
dissatisfaction  rankle.  It  was  a  fact  in  their  lives  which 
she  intended  to  turn  into  a  factor. 

She  made  a  minor  counter  of  Rupert's  marriage  to  a 
musical  comedy  actress.  "I'm  caretaker  for  a  slut,"  she 
said,  and  when,  after  the  war,  William  was  indulgent 
about  Rupert  who  was  demobilized  and  yet  did  not  come 
to  Staithley,  her  fury  was  uncontrolled.  "He  has  had 
no  honeymoon  and  no  holiday,"  said  William,  "Both  are 
due  to  him  before  he  comes  here." 

"Here,"  she  said,  "to  the  Hall,  to  turn  me  out  of  the 
only  thing  that  made  Staithley  tolerable.  You  expect 
me  to  live  in  a  villa  in  Staithley?" 

"The  Hall  is  Rupert's.  If  he  were  a  bachelor,  he  would 
no  doubt  ask  us  to  stay  on.  As  he  is  married,  we  must 
find  other  quarters." 

"But  not  in  Staithley.  William,  say  it  shall  not  be 
in  Staithley." 

"It  must." 

"I'm  evicted  for  that  slut!  Have  3^ou  no  more  thought 
for  your  wife  than  to  humiliate  me  like  that.'"' 


258  HEPPLESTALL'S 

**There  is  no  humiliation,  Gertrude.  And,  I  expect,  no 
need  to  think  of  this  at  all  yet.  Rupert  deserves  a  long 
holiday." 

"Keeping  me  on  tenterhooks,  never  knowing  from  one 
day  to  the  next  when  I  shall  get  orders  to  quit.  And,  all 
the  time  we  could  do  the  reasonable  thing.  We  could 
leave  Staithley  and  go  to  London." 

"We  shall  not  leave  Staithley,"  he  said.  "Staithley  is 
the  home  of  the  Head  of  Hepplestall's." 

"The  homeless  Head,"  she  taunted,  and  he  did,  in  fact, 
almost  as  much  as  she,  resent  the  implications  of  Rupert's 
marriage.  It  had  been  suave  living  at  the  Hall,  peopled 
with  memories  of  his  race  and,  important  point,  affording 
room  for  a  man  to  escape  into  from  his  wife.  Certainly 
he  had  been  dull  about  Rupert's  marriage,  he  hadn't  suf- 
ficiently perceived  that  he  must  leave  the  Hall  to  live  else- 
Avhere  in  Staithley.  "A  villa  in  Staithley,"  Gertrude  put 
it,  and  truly  he  supposed  that  he  must  live  in  a  house 
which  would  be  correctly  described  as  a  villa.  He 
couldn't  expect  the  associations  of  the  Hall,  but  he  wanted 
scope  in  a  Staithley  home  in  which  to  flee  from  Gertrude, 
and  looked  ahead  with  a  sense  of  weariness  to  the  long 
period  of  Rupert's  noviciate.  Then,  and  not  till  then,  he 
might  chant  his  "Nunc  dimittis"  he  might  retire  and  go, 
as  Gertrude  wished,  to  London,  but  not  before  then.  Cer- 
tainly not  before  then. 

But  war  disintegrates.  William  was  wrong  in  think- 
ing that  he  had  to  pit  his  tenacity  and  his  sense  of  duty 
only  against  Gertrude.  The  end  of  the  war  and  its  im- 
mediate sequel  were  to  blow  a  shrewd  side-wind  upon  his 
resolution  to  endure. 

The  great  delusion  of  the  war  was  that  its  end  would 
be  peace.  William  was  encouraged  by  that  delusion  to 
wrestle  with  the  war-problems  of  his  business:  the  short- 
age of  raw  cotton,  the  leaping  costs  of  production,  the 


THE  REGENCY  259 

shortage  of  shipping.  The  home  trade  was  good  beyond 
precedent,  it  almost  seemed  that  the  higher  the  price  the 
greater  the  demand;  but  the  home  market,  at  its  most  vo- 
racious, took  only  a  minor  part  of  Hepplestall's  output. 
Turkey  was  an  enemy;  India,  Cliina  and  South  America 
followed  warily  the  upward  trend  of  prices,  expecting  the 
end  of  the  war  to  bring  a  sudden  fall,  and,  also,  were  diffi- 
cult of  access  by  reason  of  the  transport  shortage.  In 
spite  of  the  military  service  act,  in  spite  of  their  woolen 
dyeing,  and  of  every  device  that  William  and  the  Board 
could  contrive  to  keep  the  great  mills  active,  there  was  un- 
employment at  Hepplestall's.  Cotton  was  rationed  in 
Lancashire  and  Hepplestall's  quota  of  the  common  stock 
was  insufficient  to  keep  their  spindles  at  work.  The  situ- 
ation was  met  adequately  by  the  Cotton  Control  Board 
and  the  Unions  and  by  the  substitution  of  corporate  spirit 
for  individualism ;  by  high  wages ;  by  a  pool  of  fines  im- 
posed on  those  who  worked  more  spindles  and  took  more 
cotton  than  their  due;  and  ends  were  met  all  round,  but, 
however  different  the  case  of  the  munition  trades,  cotton 
was  no  beneficiary  of  the  war. 

The  year  1919  brought  a  great  and  a  dangerous  reac- 
tion. It  was  seen  by  the  foreign  markets  that  their  ex- 
pectations of  a  spectacular  fall  in  prices  were  not  to  be 
realized,  and,  for  a  time,  buyers  scrambled  to  supply,  at 
any  price,  cotton  goods  to  countries  starved  of  cotton 
practically  throughout  the  war.  William  looked  back  to 
his  father's  time  when  the  margin  of  profit  on  a  pound  of 
yarn  had  been  reckoned  by  an  eighth  or  a  farthing :  it  was 
now  sixpence  or  more,  and  he  trembled  for  the  cotton 
trade.  Such  margins  had  the  febrile  unhealtliiness  of  an 
overheated  forcing-house.  He  hadn't  expected  peace  to 
duplicate  for  him  the  conditions  of  1913,  but  these  profits, 
current  in  1919,  expressed  for  him  the  hazards  of  the 
peace.     There  was  a  madness  in  the  very  air,  and  a  frenzy 


260  HEPPLESTALL'S 

of  speculation  resulted  from  this  rebound  of  the  cotton 
trade  from  war-depression  to  extreme  buoyancy.  The 
profits  were  notorious,  and  Labor  could  not  be  expected 
to  remain  without  its  share  of  the  loot.  That  was  reason- 
able enough,  but  William  had  no  faith  in  the  boom's  last- 
ing and  knew  the  difficulty  of  persuading  Labor  to  accept 
reduction  when  the  tight  times  came.  Meanwhile,  cer- 
tainly, Labor  had  a  sound  case  for  a  large  advance  in 
wages,  even  though  wages  had  steadily  risen  throughout 
the  war.  William  wondered  if  any  helmsman  of  Hepple- 
stalPs  had  ever  faced  such  anxious  times  as  these;  the 
very  appearance  of  prosperity,  deceptive  and  fleeting  as 
he  held  it  to  be,  was  incalculable  menace.  In  spite  of 
himself,  he  was  a  profiteer — not  a  war,  but  an  as-a-result- 
of-the-war  profiteer — and  both  hated  and  feared  it.  This 
was  not  peace  but  pyrotechny ;  they  were  up  like  a  rocket 
and  he  feared  to  come  down  like  the  stick. 

Lancashire  was  turned  into  a  speculator's  cockpit  and 
cotton  mill  shares  were  changing  hands  sometimes  at  ten 
times  their  nominal  value.  The  point,  especially,  was 
the  prohibitive  cost  of  building,  so  that  existing  mills  had 
monopoly  valuations.  The  general  anticipation,  which 
William  did  not  share,  was  that  a  world  hunger  for  cotton 
goods  would  sustain  the  boom  for  four  or  five  years ;  there 
was  plenty  of  war-made  wealth  ready  for  investment,  and 
the  cotton  trade  appeared  a  promising  field  for  high  and 
quick  returns. 

So  much  money  was  there  and  so  attractive  did  cotton 
trade  prospects  appear  that  the  local  speculator  began 
to  be  outbidden  very  greatly  to  his  patriotic  annoyance. 
The  annoyance,  indeed,  was  more  than  patriotic  or  pa- 
rochial, it  was  sensible.  A  highly  technical  trade  can  be 
run  to  advantage  only  when  its  controllers  have  not  only 
full  technical  knowledge,  but  full  knowledge  of  local  char- 
acteristics and  prejudices,  and  Lancashire  was,  histori- 


THE  REGENCY  261 

callj,  self-supporting  with  its  finance  as  well  as  its  trade 
under  Lancasliire  direction.  From  its  brutal  origins  to 
its  present  comparatively  humane  organization,  its  strug- 
gles and  its  achievements  had  been  its  own. 

The  interests  of  the  financier  are  financial ;  one-eyed, 
short-sighted,  parasitic  interests.  Steam  and  the  factory 
system  fell  like  a  blight  on  Lancashire,  but  they  had  in 
them  the  elements  of  progress  of  a  kind ;  they  worked  out, 
outrageously,  in  the  course  of  a  century  to  a  balance 
where  the  power  was  not  exclusively  the  employers'.  The 
object  of  the  London  financiers  who  now  perceived  in  Lan- 
cashire a  fruitful  field  was  to  buy  up  mills,  run  them, 
under  managers  for  the  first  years  of  the  boom,  then,  be- 
fore new  mills  could  be  built,  to  show  amazing  profits  and 
to  unload  on  the  guileless  public  before  the  boom  collapsed. 
It  was  a  raid  purely  in  financial  interests  and  opposed 
to  the  permanent  interests  of  Lancashire,  which  would  be 
left  to  bear,  in  a  new  era  of  distress,  the  burdens  imposed 
by  over-capitalization.  To  the  financier,  Lancashire  was 
a  counter  in  whose  future  he  had  no  interest  after  he  had 
floated  his  companies  and  got  out  with  liis  profits.  And 
he  collected  mills  like  so  many  tricks  in  his  game. 

The  owners  were  fraudulent  trustees  to  sell  even  under 
temptation  of  such  prices  as  were  offered?  Well,  many 
did  not  sell,  and  for  others  there  was  the  excuse,  besides 
natural  greed,  of  war- weariness.  They  had  the  feeling 
that  here  was  security  offered  them,  ease  after  years  of 
strain ;  it  was  a  sauve  qui  pent  and  the  devil  take  the  hind- 
most. They  were  men  who  hadn't  been  in  business  for 
their  health  and  were  offered  golden  opportunity  to  retire 
from  business.  They  had  been,  perhaps,  a  little  jealous 
of  others  who  had  made  strictly  war  wealth,  and  this  was 
their  chance  to  get  hold,  at  second  hand,  of  a  share  of 
those  war  profits.  There  was  the  example  of  others  .  .  . 
there  would  be  stressful  times  ahead  for  the  cotton  trade 


262  HEPPLESTALL'S 

,  .  .  Labor  uphearals  ...  it  was  good  to  be  out  of  it 
all,  with  one's  monej  gently  in  the  Funds. 

And  Finance  goes  stealthily  to  work:  it  was  not  at  first 
apparent,  eren  to  sellers,  that  beliind  the  nominal  buyers 
were  non-Lancashire  financiers.  There  was  no  immediate 
apprehension  of  the  objects;  nobody  took  quick  alarm. 
Labor,  especiallj'  the  Oldham  spinners,  had  cotton  shares 
to  sell  and  took  a  profit  with  the  rest.  They  started  a 
special  share  exchange  in  Oldham:  it  was  open  through 
the  Christmas  holidays  and  on  New  Year's  Day  of  1920. 
That  speaks  more  than  volumes  for  the  dementia  of  that 
boom.  Working  on  New  Year's  Day  in  Oldham!  What 
was  the  use  of  being  sentimentally  annoyed  at  being  out- 
bidden by  a  Londoner,  even  if  you  perceived  he  was  a  Lon- 
doner, when  the  congenital  idiot  offered  ten  pounds  for  a 
pound  share  on  which  you  had  only  paid  up  five  shillings? 

Appetite  grew  bj  what  it  fed  on  and  Finance  ceased  to 
be  satisfied  with  acquiring  small  mills  whose  names,  at  any 
rate,  were  unknown  to  the  outside  investor.  Hepplestall's 
was  different,  Hepplestall's  was  known  to  every  shop- 
keeper and  every  housewife  in  the  land.  It  was,  in  the 
opinion  of  Finance,  only  a  question  of  price;  and  prices 
did  not  cow  Finance. 

William  sat  in  the  office  of  the  Hepplestalls  with  a  letter 
before  hira  which  was  Finance's  opening  gambit  in  the 
game.  It  was  addressed  to  him  personally,  marked 
''private  and  confidential,'*  by  a  London  firm  of  chartered 
accountants  whose  national  eminence  left  no  doubt  of 
the  serious  intentions  of  their  clients. 

Which  of  us  does  not  know  the  fearful  joy  of  mental 
flirtation  with  crime?  William,  restraining  his  first  sound 
impulse  to  tear  up  the  letter  and  to  put  its  fragm.ent? 
where  they  properly  belonged,  in  the  waste-paper  basket, 
persuaded  himself  that  his  motive  was  simple  curiosity. 
It  had  nothing  to  do  with  Gertrude,  nor  with  her  im- 


THE  REGENCY  263 

patience  of  Rupert  who  was  prolonging  a  holiday  into  a 
habit,  and  who,  if  he  made  no  signal  that  her  reign  in 
Staithley  Hall  must  end,  made  no  signal,  either,  that  his 
training  for  the  Service  must  begin.  By  tliis  time, 
William  had,  distinctly,  his  puzzled  misgivings  about 
Rupert,  but  he  hadn't  quite  reached  the  point  of  seeing  in 
Rupert's  absence  and  his  uncommunicativeness  a  deliberate 
challenge  to  the  Service.  He  attributed  to  thoughtless- 
ness an  absence  which  was  thoughtful. 

He  had  at  first  no  other  idea  than  to  calculate  what 
fabulous  figure  would,  in  existing  circumstances,  be  justly 
demanded  for  Hepplestall's  on  the  ridiculous  hypothesis 
of  Hepplestall's  being  for  sale.  There  was  surely  no 
harm  on  a  slack  morning  in  a  little  theoretic  financial  ex- 
ercise of  that  kind.  There  wasn't;  but,  for  all  that,  he 
went  about  the  collecting  of  data,  alone  in  his  office  under 
the  pictured  e3^es  of  bygone  Hepplestalls,  with  the  furtive 
air  of  a  criminal. 

For  insurance  purposes,  in  view  of  post-war  values, 
they  had  recently  had  a  professional  valuation  made  of  the 
mills,  machinery,  office  and  warehouse  buildings  in  Staith- 
ley and  Manchester.  Providential,  WOliam  thought, 
meaning,  of  course,  no  more  than  that  he  need  not  waste 
more  than  an  hour  or  so  in  satisfying  his  natural  curiosity. 
It  was,  he  asserted,  defiantly  daring  the  gaze  of  the 
Founder  on  the  wall,  natural  to  be  curious. 

He  had  the  valuation  for  insurance  before  him  now :  ho 
applied  the  multiplication  table  to  reach  an  estimate  of  the 
market  value.  He  meditated  goodwill.  Guiltily  he  at- 
tempted to  capitalize  the  name  of  Hepplestall's,  and  it 
made  him  feel  less  guilty  to  capitalize  it  in  5?even  figures. 
The  total  result  was  so  large  that,  notwithstanding  the 
national  eminence  of  the  chartered  accountrnts  whose 
letter  was  in  his  pocket,  he  felt  justified  in  regarding  his 
proceedings  as  completely  extravagant. 


264  HEPPLESTALL'S 

So  he  might  just  as  well  amuse  himself  further.     He 
might,  for  instance,  refresh  his  memory  of  the  distribution 
of  Hepplestall's  shares,  and  he  might  turn  up  the  articles 
of  association  and  see  if  that  document,  usually  so  com- 
prehensive, had  anticipated  this  unlikeliest  of  all  improb- 
abilities, a  sale  of  Hepplestall's:  and  what  emerged  from 
his  investigation  was  the  fact  that  if  he  and  Rupert  voted, 
on  their  joint  holdings  of  shares,  for  a  sale  at  a  legally 
summoned  general  meeting  of  Hepplestall's  shareholders, 
a  sale  would  be  authorized.     He  and  Rupert!     William 
found  himself  sweating  \'iolently.     It  was  impure,  obscene 
nightmare,  but  style  his  communings  what  he  would,  the 
pass  was  there  and  he  and  Rupert  had  the  power  to  sell  it. 
He  rose  and  paced  the  room.      War  disintegrates,  but 
not  to  this  degree,  not  to  the  degree  of  dissipating  the  tra- 
dition of  the  Hepplestalls.     He,  the  Head,  the  Chief  Trus- 
tee, had  meditated  treachery,  but  only  (he  faced  the  por- 
traits reassuringly),  only  speculatively,  only  in  pursuit  of 
a  train  of  thought  started  by  an  impertinent  letter,  which 
he  had  not  torn  up.     No,  he  had  not  torn  it  up,  he  had 
preserved  it  as  laughable  proof  of  the  insensibility  to  finer 
issues  of  these  financial  people.     He  would  show  it  to  his 
brothers  or  to  Rupert:  it  would  become  quite  a  family  jest. 
To  Rupert?     Indeed  he  ought  to  show  it  first  to  Ru- 
pert,   the    future   Head.     He    could,   jokingly,    good-hu- 
moredly,  use  it  as  a  lever  to  make  Rupert  conscious  of  his 
responsibilities,  he  could  say  "if  you  don't  come  quickly, 
there'll  be  no  Hepplestall's  for  you  to  come  to.     Look  at 
this  letter.     You  and  I,  between  us,  have  controlling  inter- 
est ;  we  could  sell  the  firm,  and  the  rest  of  the  Board  could 
not  effectively  prevent  us.     I'm  joking,  of  course.     That 
sort  of  thing  isn't  in  the  tradition  of  the  Hepplestalls. 
And,  by  the  way,  speaking  of  the  tradition,  when  are  we 
to  expect  you  amongst  us  .'"* 

Something  like  that;  not  a  bit  a  business  letter,  not 


THE  REGENCY  265 

serious;  genial  and  avuncular;  but  there  was,  manifestly, 
a  Rupert  affair,  and  tliis  impudent  inquiry  of  the  eminent 
chartered  accountants  was  the  very  means  to  bring  the 
affair  to  a  head.  The  boy  was  exceeding  the  license 
allowed  even  to  one  who  had  been  in  the  war  from  the  be- 
ginning; it  was  nearly  a  year  since  his  demobilization. 

William  thought  that  his  letter  would  seem  more  friendly 
if  he  addressed  it  from  the  Hall  and  looked  in  his  desk  for 
notepaper.  He  seemed  to  have  run  out  of  the  supply  of 
private  notepaper  he  kept  in  his  desk;  then  the  spinning 
manager  interrupted  him.  He  put  the  letter  in  his  pocket 
again :  he  would  write  to  Rupert  after  lunch  at  the  Hall. 

He  was  busy  for  some  time  with  the  spinning  manager, 
and  went  home  convinced  that  the  only  serious  thought  he 
had  ever  had  about  the  letter  in  his  pocket  was  of  its 
opportuneness  in  the  matter  of  Rupert.  It  was  nothing 
beyond  a  plausible  excuse  for  writing  to  Rupert  essentially 
on  another  subject  and  the  figures  in  his  note-book  were 
not  a  traitor's  secret  but  the  meaningless  result  of  a  mid- 
dle-aged gentleman's  mental  gymnastics. 

He  lunched  alone  with  Gertrude  and,  "I'm  writing  to 
Rupert  to-day,"  he  said  incautiously. 

"Oh?"     She  bristled.     "Why?" 

He  perceived  and  regretted  his  incaution.  It  was  in- 
discreet to  say  that  his  object  was  to  urge  Rupert  to 
Staithley  when  that  coming  could  only  mean  Gertrude's 
going  from  the  Hall.  "Oh,"  he  said,  "I've  to  send  on  a 
letter  which  will  amuse  him."  He  had  decided  that  the 
only  use  of  that  letter  was  humorous;  it  was  a  jest,  ques- 
tionable in  taste  but  illustrative  of  the  times  and  therefore 
to  be  mentioned  in  the  family  and  preserved  as  a  curiosity 
amongst  the  papers  of  the  firm.  And  if  it  were  going  to 
be  a  family  diversion,  who  had  better  right  than  William's 
wife  to  be  the  first  to  enjoy  it  with  him?  She  had  un- 
real grievances  enough  without  his  adding  to  them  the  real 


266  HEPPLESTALL'S 

grievance  of  his  denying  her  the  right  to  laugh  at  those 
harlequin  accountants  who  so  grotesquely  misapprehended 
Hepplestall's.  "This  is  the  letter,"  he  said,  passing  it 
across  to  her,  expecting,  actually,  that  she  would  smile. 

She  did  not  smile.  "I  see,"  she  said,  and,  in  fact,  saw 
very  well.  Women's  incomprehension  of  business  has  been 
exaggerated.  "Why,  to  arrive  at  the  figure  they  ask  for 
would  take  weeks  of  work." 

*'I  got  at  it  roughly  in  half  an  hour  this  morning,"  he 
boasted. 

"And  sent  it  to  them?"  she  asked  quickly. 

"Oh  dear,  no.  I  was  only  doing  it  as  a  matter  of  curi- 
osity.    If  I  sent  them  my  result,  I  should  frighten  them." 

"They  must  expect  something  big,  though.  Shan't  you 
reply  at  all  or  are  you  consulting  Rupert  first?" 

"I'd  hardly  say  *consult,'  "  he  said.  "I'm  sending  it 
him  as  I  show  it  you — as  a  joke.  I  shall  point  out  to 
him,  as  a  form,  that  he  and  I  between  us  have  a  controlling 
share  interest.  I  shall  jest  about  our  powers.  It's  an 
opportunity  of  making  Rupert  awake  to  his  responsi- 
bilities." 

"Yes,"  said  Gertrude,  "I  see.  And  j^ou  know  best, 
dear."  She  was  dangerously  uncombative,  arranging  her 
mental  notes  that,  though  he  derided  'the  letter,  he  had 
prepared  an  estimate  and  that  he  was  writing  to  Rupert 
who,  with  William,  could  take  decisive  action.  By  way 
purely  of  showing  him  how  little  seriously  she  took  it,  she 
changed  the  subject. 

"I  heard  from  Connie  Duxbury  this  morning,"  she  said. 

"Not  the  most  desirable  of  your  acquaintances,  I  think," 
said  William. 

"Oh,  my  dear.     Sir  Ralph's  a  member  of  Parliament 


now." 


j> 


"It  isn't  a  certificate  of  respectability.' 

She  looked  thoughtfully  at  him,  as  he  rose  and  went 


THE  REGENCY  267 

into  the  library  to  write  to  Rupert,  with  the  careful, 
anxious  gaze  of  a  wife  who  sees  in  her  husband  the  symp- 
toms of  ill-health.  She  wished  to  leave  Staithley  for  her 
own  sake,  but  decidedly  it  was  for  William's  sake  as  well. 
In  Manchester,  if  he  had  not  been  advanced,  if  (for  in- 
stance) his  play  at  Bridge  was  circumspect  while  hers 
was  dashing,  he  had  been  broadminded.  She  remembered 
that  he  had  spoken  of  Sir  Ralph  as  a  profiteer,  but  had 
admitted  that  most  of  their  friends  were  profiteers. 
Staithley,  already,  was  narrowing  William,  in  months. 
What  would  it  not  do  for  him  in  years?  She  must  get 
him  out  of  Staithley  before  it  was  too  late. 

He  was  writing  to  Rupert;  so  would  she  write  to  Ru- 
pert. She  would  assume,  and  she  had  her  shrewd  idea 
that  the  assumption  was  correct,  that  Rupert's  views  of 
Staithley  marched  with  her  own.  She  would  paint  in  lurid 
colors  a  picture  of  life  in  Staithley ;  she  would  exhibit  Wil- 
liam, his  furrowed  brow,  his  whitening  hair,  as  an  awful 
warning;  she  would  enlarge  upon  the  post-war  difficulties, 
so  immensely  more  wearisome  than  in  Sir  Philip's  time. 
She  would  suggest  that  the  accountants'  letter  was  a  sal- 
vation, a  means  honorable  and  reasonable,  of  cutting  the 
entail,  of  escaping  from  the  Service.  And  she  would  tell 
him  to  regard  her  letter  as  confidential. 

She  had  no  doubt  whatever  of  her  success  with  Rupert 
and  as  to  William,  waverer  was  written  all  over  liim.  Ru- 
pert's decision  would  decide  William,  and  the  William 
Hepplestalls  would  go  to  London.  There  were  housing 
troubles,  but  if  you  had  money  and  if  you  took  time  by  the 
forelock,  trouble  melted.  She  proceeded  to  take  time  by 
the  forelock  and  wrote  to  Lady  Duxbury  to  ask  her  to 
keep  an  eye  open  for  a  large  house  near  her  own.  She 
whispered  to  her  dearest  Connie  in  the  very,  very  strictest 
confidence  that  Hepples tali's  was  going  to  be  sold. 


CHAPTER  IX 


MARY   ARDEX'S   HUSBAND 


6  (  /^  IVE  up  the  stage !"  echoed  Mr.  Chown,  assuming 
VJI    an  appearance  of  thunderstruck  amazement. 

"Don't  act  at  me,  my  friend,"  said  Mary.  "You  must 
have  had  the  probability  in  mind  ever  since  I  told  you  I 
was  married." 

He  had ;  that  was  the  worst  of  women ;  an  agent  sweated 
blood  to  make  a  woman  into  a  star,  and  the  thankless  crea- 
ture married  and  retired.  But  Mary  had  not  immediately 
retired  and  he  thought  he  had  reasonable  grounds  for  hop- 
ing that  she  would  continue  to  pay  him  his  commission 
for  many  years;  a  woman  who  married  well  and  yet  re- 
mained on  the  stage  could  surely  be  acting  only  because 
she  liked  it,  and  Mr.  Chown  had  a  lure  to  dangle  before 
her  which  could  hardly  fail  of  its  effect  upon  any  actress 
who  cared  two  straws  for  her  profession. 

He  remembered  the  day  when  he  had  rung  up  Rossiter 
and  had  said,  "Mary's  married,"  and  Rossiter  had  replied, 
"Right,  I'll  watch  her,"  and,  a  little  later,  had  told  him 
*'Mary  will  do.     She  can  play  Sans-Gene." 

That  was  the  bait  he  had  for  Mary.  When  (if  ever), 
London  tired  of  "Granada  the  Gay,"  she  was  to  play 
Sans-G^ne.  She  was  to  stand  absolutely  at  the  head  of 
her  profession.  He  reviewed  musical  comedy  and  could 
think  of  no  woman's  part  in  all  its  repertoire  which  was 
so  signally  the  blue  riband  of  the  lighter  stage;  and  Ros- 
siter destined  it  for  the  wear  of  Mary  Arden ! 

268 


MARY  ARDEN'S  HUSBAND  269 

"Listen  to  this,  Mary.  Do  you  know  what  Rossiter  is 
doing  next  ?" 

"I'll  see  it  from  the  stalls,"  she  said. 

"No.  You'll  be  it.  You'll  be  Sans-Gene  in  'The  Duch- 
ess of  Dantzig.'  '* 

"I  didn't  tell  you  I'm  retiring  from  the  stage,  did  I? 
All  I  said  was  that  it's  possible." 

*'Ah!"  said  Chown,  watching  his  bait  at  work. 

"You're  wrong,"  she  said.     "You're  wrong," 

He  put  his  hand  on  hers.     "Am  I,  Mary.?     Absolutely.'"* 

"No,"  she  confessed,  "and*  I'm  grateful.  You've  done 
many  things  for  me  and  this  is  the  biggest  of  them  all. 
If  I  stay  on  the  stage,  I'll  play  it  and  I'll  .  .  .  I'll  not 
make  a  failure.  But  3'ou  haven't  tempted  me  to  stay. 
I'm  getting  mixed.  I  mean  I'm  tempted,  horribly.  I've 
a  megaphone  in  my  brain  that's  shouting  at  me  to  damn 
everything  and  just  jolly  well  show  them  what  I  can  do 
with  that  part.  But  I  won't  damn  everything.  I  won't 
forget  the  things  that  make  it  doubtful  whether  I'll  stay 
on  the  stage  or  not.  I'll  give  up  Sans-Gene  rather  than 
forget  them,  and  I  know  as  well  as  you  do  what  Rossiter 
means  by  casting  me  for  that  part.  He  means  that 
Mary's  right  there," 

*'Yes,"  said  Chown,  "he  means  that." 

"It's  decent  of  him.  We'll  be  decent,  too,  please. 
We'll  tell  him  there's  a  doubt." 

"Look  here,  Mary,  I  know  you  well  enough  to  ask.  Is 
it  a  baby.?" 

She  shook  her  head.  "Not  that  sort  of  baby,"  she  said, 
and  puzzled  him. 

It  was  Rupert.  In  Mary's  opinion,  Rupert  was  in  dan- 
ger of  becoming  the  husband  of  Mary  Arden,  one  of  those 
deplorable  hangers-on  of  the  theater  who  assert  a  busy 
self-importance  because  they  are  married  to  somebody  who 
is  famous.     He  hadn't,  quite,  come  to  that  yet,  but  it  was 


270  HEPPLESTALL'S 

difficult  to  see  what  else  he  could  assert  of  himself  beyond 
his  emphatic  negative  against  going  to  Staithley ;  and  she 
proposed  very  definitely  that  he  should  not  come  to  it, 
either.  He  should  not,  even  if  she  had  to  leave  the  stage, 
even  if  she  must  sacrifice  so  great,  so  climactic  a  part  as 
Sans-Gene. 

She  had  not  come  painlessly  to  that  opinion  of  him. 
She  had  not  watched  him  since  his  demobilization  and  she 
had  not  come  to  her  profound  conviction  that  something 
was  very  wrong  with  Rupert,  without  feeling  shame  at  her 
scrutiny  and  distrust  of  this  love  of  hers  which  could  dis- 
parage. At  first,  while  he  was  still  at  the  Front,  she  went 
on  acting  simply  to  drug  anxiety.  She  acted  on  the  stage 
by  night  and  for  the  films  by  day,  and  later  it  was  to  see 
if  she  could  not,  by  setting  an  example,  persuade  him  that 
work  was  a  sound  diet ;  and  now  she  was  afraid  that  the 
example  had  miscarried  and  that  her  associations  with  the 
stage  were  doing  him  a  miscliief.  To  work  in  the  Galaxy 
was  one  thing,  to  loaf  in  it  another,  and  he,  who  had  no 
work  to  do  there,  was  in  it  a  good  deal. 

If  Rupert  was  developing  anything,  it  was  listlessness. 
He  had  an  animal  content  in  Mary,  and  was  allowing  a 
honeymoon  to  become  a  routine.  Perhaps  because  she 
was  a  certainty  and  because  the  w^ar  had  sated  liim  with 
hazards,  he  could  not  bear  to  be  away  from  her.  She  had 
suggested  Cambridge  and,  though  it  was  flat,  was  ready 
to  go  there  with  him.  He  went  and  looked  at  Cambridge, 
found  it  overcrowded  and  returned  to  London.  Through 
the  summer  he  played  some  cricket,  in  minor  M.  C.  C. 
matches,  and  did  not  find  his  fonn.  He  thought  of  golf 
for  the  winter,  found  that  the  good  clubs  had  long  waiting 
lists,  and,  though  friends  offered  to  rush  him  in,  refused  to 
have  strings  pulled  for  him. 

Privately,  he  had  self-criticism  and  tried  to  stifle  it. 
There  was  a  miasma  of  disillusionment  everywhere ;  there 


MARY  ARDEN'S  HUSBAND  271 

was  the  Peace  that  was  mislaid  by  French  pawnbrokers 
instead  of  being  made  b}'^  gentlemen ;  there  was  the  impulse 
to  forget  the  war  on  the  part  of  the  civilian  population 
who  now  seemed  so  brutally  in  possession;  there  was  the 
treatment  of  disbanded  soldiery  which,  tliis  time,  was  to 
have  belied  historj^,  and  didn't.  He  strained  to  believe  the 
current  dicta  of  the  minority  mind  and  to  find  in  them 
excuse  for  his  lethargy. 

He  was,  no  doubt,  tired ;  but  whatever  subtle  infections 
of  the  soul  might  be  distressing  him,  materially  at  any 
rate  he  was  immune  from  the  common  aggravation  of  high 
prices.  He  made  that  explicitly  one  of  his  excuses.  It 
wasn't  fair  that  he,  who  had  all  the  money  he  needed, 
should  take  a  job  from  a  man  who  needed  money. 
*'There's  unpaid  work,"  thought  Mary,  but  she  did  not  say 
it.  She  thought  he  must  sooner  or  later  see  it  for  him- 
self. 

He  did  see  it  and  tried  to  blink  at  it.  He  was  of  the 
Hepplestalls,  of  a  race  who  weren't  acclimatized  to  leisure, 
who  found  happiness  in  setting  their  teeth  in  work.  He 
was  bom  with  a  conscience  and  couldn't  damp  it  down. 
He  was  aware,  at  the  back  of  behind,  that  it  was  hurting 
him  to  turn  a  deaf  ear  to  the  call  of  Staithley.  He  had 
done  worse  things  than  Staithley  implied  in  the  necessity 
of  war,  and  there  was  also  a  necessity  of  peace.  He  felt 
nobly  moral  to  let  such  sentiments  find  lodgment  in  his 
mind. 

His  father's  diffident  comparison  of  the  Hepplestalls 
with  the  Samurai  came  back  to  liim.  Yes,  one  ought  to 
serve,  but  it  wasn't  necessary  to  go  to  Staithley  to  be  a 
Samurai.  One  could  be  a  Samurai  in  London.  He,  de- 
cisively, was  forced  to  be  a  Samurai  in  London  because 
he  had  married  Mary  Arden  and  to  wrench  her  fi-om  her 
vocation,  to  take  her  away  from  London,  was  un- 
thinkable. 


272  HEPPLESTALL'S 

There  was  no  hurry  to  set  about  discovering  the  place 
of  a  Samurai  in  modern  London.  Like  everybody  else 
he  had,  with  superlative  reason,  promised  himself  a  good 
time  after  the  war,  and  if  the  good  time  had  its  unfore- 
seen drawbacks,  that  was  no  ground  for  refusing  to  en- 
joy all  the  good  there  was.  Mary  was  not  the  whole  of 
the  good  time,  but  she  was  its  center.  He  supposed  he 
couldn't — certainly  he  couldn't ;  there  were  other  things  in 
life  than  a  wife — concentrate  indefinitely  on  Mary,  but 
this  world  of  the  theater  to  which  she  belonged  was  so 
jolly,  so  strange  to  him,  so  unaccountably  enthralling. 
He  became  expert  in  its  politics  and  its  gossip.  He  was 
obsessed  by  it  through  her  who  had  never  been  obsessed. 
He  was  duped,  as  she  had  never  been  since  Hugh  Darley 
applied  his  corrective  to  her  childish  errors,  by  the  ter- 
ribly false  perspective  of  the  theater.  He  saw  the  theater, 
indeed,  in  terms  of  Mary;  several  times  a  week  he  sat 
through  her  scenes  in  a  stall  at  the  Galaxy,  and  when  she 
scoffed  at  the  idiotic  pride  he  took  in  gleaning  inside  in- 
formation, in  knowing  what  so  and  so  was  going  to  do 
before  the  announcement  appeared  in  the  papers,  and  at 
being  privileged  to  go  to  some  dress-rehearsals,  it  was,  he 
thought,  only  because  she  was  used  to  it  all  while  he  came 
freshly  to  it.  He  might  even  find  that  a  Samurai  was 
needed  in  the  theater.  Would  Mary  like  him  to  put  up  a 
play  for  her?  He  thought  her  reply  hardly  fair  to  the 
excellence  of  his  intentions.  But  if  she  refused,  incisively, 
to  let  him  be  a  Samurai  of  the  theater,  she  was  troubled 
to  see  him  continue  his  education  of  an  initiate. 

He  was  self -persuaded  that  his  fussy  loafing  had  im- 
portance, when  it  was,  at  most,  a  turbid  retort  to  con- 
science. He  was  feeling  his  way,  he  was  learning  the 
ropes,  he  was  meditating  his  plans,  and  there  was  no  lack 
of  flattering  council  offered  to  the  husband  of  Mary  Arden 
who  was,  besides,  rich. 


MARY  ARDEN'S  HUSBAND  273 

Big  fleas  have  little  fleas 
Upon  their  backs  to  bite  'em 
These  fleas  have  other  fleas 
And  so,  ad  infinitum. 

Morally,  he  was  the  little  flea  on  Mary's  back,  and  he 
was  collecting  parasites  on  his  own.  Then  William's 
letter  came,  offering  a  clean  cut  from  Staithley  and  an 
annihilating  reply  to  his  conscience. 

He  didn't  need  Gertrude's  letter  to  show  him  exactly 
what  William's  and  William's  enclosure  meant.  He  read 
clearly  between  the  lines  that  William  wobbled.  "He's 
on  the  fence,"  he  thought,  "he  doesn't  need  a  push  to  shove 
him  over, — he  needs  a  touch."  Then  Rupert  and  Wil- 
liam, acting  together,  must  face  a  hostile  Board  of  con- 
servative Hepplestalls,  and  a  nasty  encounter  he  expected 
it  to  be.  They  wouldn't  spare  words  about  his  father's 
son. 

But  that  was  a  small  price  to  pay  for  freedom;  Rupert 
and  William  had  the  whip  hand  and  the  rest  of  the  Hep- 
plestalls could  howl,  they  could — they  would;  he  could 
hear  them — shriek  "Treachery"  and  "Blasphemy"  at  him, 
but  it  was  only  a  case  of  keeping  a  stiff  upper  lip  through 
an  unpleasant  quarter  of  an  hour,  and  he  was  quit  of  the 
Service  for  ever.     There  would  no  longer  be  a  Service. 

That  was  a  tremendous  thought,  breath-catching  like — 
oh,  like  half  a  hundred  things  which  had  happened  to  him 
in  France.  Yes,  that  was  the  true  perspective.  The  war 
had  played  the  deuce  with  tradition,  it  had  finished  bigger 
things  than  the  service  of  the  Hepplestalls.  They  would 
have  to  see,  these  Hepplestalls,  that  he  was  a  man  of  the 
new  era,  a  realist,  not  to  be  bamboozled  by  their  antique 
sentimentalities.  If  they  wanted  still  to  serve,  it  could  be 
arranged,  as  part  of  the  conditions  of  the  purchase,  that 
they  should  serve  the  incoming  owner.  He  was  disoblig- 
ing nobody. 


274  HEPPLESTALL'S 

He  looked  up  to  find  Mary  studying  his  face.  "Sorry, 
old  thing,"  he  said,  "but  these  are  rather  important. 
Letters  from  Staithley." 

"Staithley !" 

"Yes.  I  expect  you'd  forgotten  there  is  such  a  place. 
I  haven't  spoken  of  it,  but  Staithley  has  been  in  my  mind 
a  good  deal  lately.  I've  found  myself  wondering  if  I  was 
altogether  right  in  giving  it  the  go-by.  I've  wondered  if 
I  quite  played  the  game."  It  didn't  hurt  to  say  these 
things  now  that  the  means  to  abolish  the  Service  were  in 
his  hands ;  he  could  admit  aloud  to  Mary  what  he  hadn't 
cared,  before,  to  admit  to  himself.  And  he  was  too  inter- 
ested in  his  point  of  view  to  note  the  quick  thankfulness 
in  Mary's  face,  and  her  joy  at  his  confession.  Complac- 
ently he  went  on,  "That's  putting  it  too  strongly,  but 
.  .  .  ancestors.  It's  absurd,  but  I've  been  in  the  street 
and  I've  had  the  idea  that  one  of  those  musty  old  fellows 
who  are  hung  up  on  the  walls  in  Hepplestall's  office  was 
following  me  about,  going  to  trip  me  up  or  knock  me  on 
the  head  or  something.  I've  looked  over  my  shoulder. 
I've  jumped  into  a  taxi.  Nerves,  of  course,  and  you'd 
have  thought  my  nerves  were  tough  enough  at  this  time 
of  day.  I'm  telling  you  this  so  that  you'll  rejoice  with 
me  in  these  letters.  They're  the  answer  to  it  all.  There's 
no  question  about  playing  the  game  when  the  game's  no 
longer  there  to  play." 

He  gave  her  the  letters.  She  hadn't  known  how  much 
she  had  continued  to  be  hopeful  of  the  Staithley  idea,  not 
for  herself,  not  for  a  Bradshaw  who  might  live  in  Staith- 
ley Hall,  but  for  him;  and  his  admission  that  Staithlev  had 
been  in  his  mind  was  evidence  that  he  knew  occultly  the 
root  cause  of  his  derangement.  These  letters,  he  told  her, 
were  the  answer  to  it  all,  and  they  could  be  nothing  but  the 
call  to  Staithley,  an  ultimatum  which  he  meant  to  obey, 
of  which  he  had  the  charming  grace  to  admit  that  he  was 


MARY  ARDEN'S  HUSBAND  275 

glad.  Indeed,  indeed,  she  would  rejoice  with  him.  He 
was  going  to  Staithley,  to  work,  to  be  cured  by  work  and 
the  tonic  air  of  the  moors  of  the  poison  London  had 
dropped  into  his  system. 

"This  will  finish  off  that  old  bogey,"  he  exulted  and  she 
exulted  with  him  as  she  bent  her  eyes  to  read  the  letters. 
She  read  and  saw  with  what  disastrous  optimism  she  had 
misunderstood.  And  he  stood  there  aglow  with  happiness, 
expectant  of  her  congratulations  when  this  was  not  the 
beginning  of  new  life  but  the  death  of  hope!  "Well.'"'  he 
asked.     "Well.?" 

"It  does  seem  to  depend  on  you,"  she  hedged. 

**Uncle  William  would  if  he  dared,  eh?  He's  as  good 
as  asking  me  to  dare  for  him,  and  I'll  dare  all  right.  I'll 
wire  that  I'll  see  him  to-morrow  afternoon.  That's  soon 
enough.     I'll  go  by  car.     It's  a  beastly  railway  journey." 

*' Aren't  you  deciding  very  quickly,  Rupert.?" 

"I  thought  for  a  solid  five  minutes  before  I  handed  the 
letters  across  to  you."  He  was  most  indignant  at  her 
imputation  of  hastiness. 

"I  was  watching  you.  Five  minutes !  Not  long  to  give 
to  the  considei'ation  of  a  death  sentence." 

"A— what?" 

"Staithley.      Staithley  Mills  without  the  Hepplestalls  !" 

"Oh,  they'll  survive  it.  This  tiling's  a  gift  from  God, 
and  I'm  not  going  to  turn  my  back  on  the  deity.  It's 
bad  manners.  Candidly,  I'm  surprised  at  you,  Mary. 
You  might  be  thinking  there's  something  to  argue  about. 
You  might  be  sentimental  for  the  Hepplestalls." 

*'No,"  she  said.  "For  a  Hepplestall.  For  you.  Ru- 
pert, I'll  leave  the  stage  to-morrow  if  you  will  go  and  do 
your  work  at  Staitliley." 

"Good  Lord!  Besides,  aren't  you  rather  forgetting? 
Aren't  you  forgetting  you're  a  Bradshaw?" 

'It  is  quite  safe  to  forget  that.     I'm  Mary  Arden. 


«i 


276  HEPPLESTALL'S 

Nobody  knows  me.  It's  too  long  since  I  was  anything  but 
that." 

"Oh,  it  wouldn't  do.  Too  risky  altogether.  Oh,  never. 
Staithley's  the  one  place  that's  absolutely  barred." 

"Rupert,  you're  making  me  responsible.  You're  using 
me  as  your  excuse." 

"Damn  it,  Mary,  do  you  want  us  to  live  in  Staithley?'* 

"Yes." 

"Well,  I'm  sorry.  We  can't.  I  do  you  the  justice  to 
tell  you  I've  never  found  you  a  capricious  woman  before. 
But  it's  plain  that  this  is  one  of  the  times  when  a  man  has 
to  put  his  foot  down  on  ...  on  sentimentality  and  all 
that  sort  of  thing." 

"Your  conscience  was  troubling  you,  Rupert." 

"It  was,  I've  admitted  it.  And  tliis  letter  is  my  quit- 
tance.    It  washes  conscience  out.     It  closes  the  account.'' 

"No.     You're  still  troubled." 

"I'll  be  hanged !     Do  you  keep  my  conscience?" 

*'I  want  us  to  go  to  Staithley,  Rupert." 

"This  time,  I  can't  give  you  what  you  want,  Mary. 
I'm  going  to  Staithley  alone,  for  the  purpose  of  cutting 
Staithley  out  of  my  life  for  ever.  I'm  sorry  about  your 
attitude.  I'm  completely  fogged  by  it,  but  I'm  not  going 
to  talk  about  it  any  more.  This  is  the  nearest  we've  ever 
come  to  quarreling  and  we'll  get  no  nearer.  I'll  go  along 
for  the  car  now." 

"Just  one  moment  first,  though.  You  say  you're 
putting  your  foot  do%vn.     I  have  a  foot  as  well  as  you." 

*'I  adore  your  foot,  Mary.     If  I  were  a  sculptor — " 

"Seriously,  Rupert,  I'm  going  to  fight  this.  You're  do- 
ing wrong,  you  know  you're  doing  wrong — " 

"Fight?"  he  said.  "My  dear  Mary,  perhaps  you  own 
half  of  Hepplestall's  shares?     Now  I'd  an  idea  it  was  I." 

"Yes,  it  is  you.  It's  the  man  I  love,  and  I  won't  see 
you  do  this  rotten  thing  and  raise  no  hand  to  stop  you.'* 


MARY  ARDEN'S  HUSBAND  277 


«r 


'There  are  two  things  that  I  deny.  It  isn't  rotten  and 
you  can't  stop  me.  So,  won't  you  just  admit  that  you're 
a  woman  and  that  you're  out  of  your  depth?  Let's  kiss 
and  be  friends." 

"When  we've  just  declared  war?"  she  smiled. 

'Oh,  that's  rubbish.     You've  no  munitions,  my  dear." 

'I've  love,"  she  said,  "and  love  will  find  me  weapons. 
Perhaps  love  won't  be  particular  what  weapons  it  finds, 
either.  If  love  finds  poison-gas,  you  won't  forget  there's 
love  behind  the  gas,  will  you?  I  want  you  to  under- 
stand. You  offered  me  -something.  You  offered  to 
put  Mary  Arden  in  a  theater  of  her  own.  Well, 
it's  the  dream  of  every  actress  and  God  knows  it's 
good  enough  for  Mary  Arden.  To  be  in  management, 
and  in  management  where  there's  lots  of  money  to  do 
exactly  as  I  want!" 

"And  more  money  when  this  sale's  gone  through,"  he 
said  eagerly. 

"Yes,"  she  said,  "it's  fine  for  Mary.  It's  more  than 
good  enough  for  her.  But  it  isn't  good  enough  for  Mary's 
Rupert.  Don't  you  see  it?  You  must,  you  must.  To  be 
running  an  entertainment  factory,  when  you  might  be  nin- 
ning  Hepplestall's?" 

"You  know,  you're  looking  at  the  theater  through  the 
wrong  end  of  the  telescope,  and  at  Hepplestall's  through 
the  right.  You  haven't  a  notion  of  the  wonderful  things 
I'd  planned  to  do  for  3  ou  in  the  theater.  You've  never 
let  me  speak  of  them.  And  it  isn't  running  Hepplestall's 
either.  Not  for  a  long  time.  If  I  just  went  up  there  and 
walked  into  the  office  as  head  of  Hepplestall's,  there  might 
be  some  sense  in  what  you  say,  but  I  don't  do  that.  I  go 
into  the  mills  and  spin  and  do  all  sorts  of  footling  jobs  for 
years.  Years,  I  tell  you,"  he  shouted  and  then  it  occurred 
to  him  that  he  was  arguing  and  had  said  he  would  not 
argue.     "The  simple  fact  is  that  you  don't  know  what 


278  HEPPLESTALL'S 

jou're  talking  about  and  that  I  do.     We'll  let  it  rest  at 
that,  except  that  I'm  now  going  for  the  car." 
"And  except,"  said  Mary,  "that  I  am  fighting." 
"You  darling,"  he  said  contemptuously,  and  went  out. 
Advocacy  has  its  perils  for  the  advocate.     In  the  heat 
of  argument,  she  had  felt  confident  of  her  weapon  and  now 
she   doubted   if  it   were    a  weapon   or  hers    to   use.     In 
promising  Rupert  a  fight  she  had  Tom  Bradshaw  in  mind ; 
it  had  seemed  to  her  that  Labor  had  only  to  lift  its  voice 
in  order  to  obtain  anything  it  demanded,  and  wasn't  Tom 
member  for  Staithley?     But  now  that  Rupert  had  gone 
and  she  was  able  coolly  to  examine  the  weapon  she  pro- 
posed to  enlist,  she  couldn't  imagine  why  she  ever  thought 
it  would  fight  in  her  cause.     Why  should  she,  after  so 
many  years,  have  thought  of  Tom  at  all?     He  had  noth- 
ing to  thank  her  for;  that  much  was  certain,  but  she  had 
instinctively  thought  of  him  as  her  true  ally  in  her  strug- 
gle for  the  soul  of  Rupert  Hepplestall.     So,  though  she 
saw  no  reason  in  it,  she  would  carry  out  her  intention,  she 
would  send  for  Tom  Bradshaw.     If  he  was  nothing  else,  he 
was  a  Staithley  man,  and  he  was  something  else.     He  was 
a  Bradshaw.     So  was  she.     That  was  reason  enough  to 
send  for  him. 

Time  was  against  her  and  she  didn't  know  how  to  set 
about  finding  his  address,  but  the  paper  informed  her — 
she  didn't  as  a  rule  take  stock  of  the  fact — that  the  House 
was  sitting.  A  phrase  caught  her  eye.  "Labor  members 
absented  themselves  from  the  debate."  Suppose  he  were 
absent  to-day?     She  could  only  try.     She  wrote — 

Dear  Mr.  Bradshaw: 

I  am  writing  in  case  I  do  not  find  you  at  the  House.  I  want  to 
see  you  urgently.  You  may  possibly  have  noticed  that  Sir  Rupert 
Hepplestall  married  Mary  Arden  of  the  Galaxy  Theatre.  I  enclose 
tickets  for  both  this  afternoon  and  to-night.  I  rmist  see  you,  please. 
If  I  am  on  the  stage  when  you  come,  have  a  look  at  me,  but  come 


MARY  ARDEN'S  HUSBAND  279 

round  behind  the  moment  I  am  off.     They  will  bring  you  to  me  at 
ODce.     Failing  that,  telephone  me  here.     It  is  really  important 

Yours  sincerely, 

Maey  Hepple8tall. 

She  meant  to  have  written  that  Mary  Arden  was  Mary 
Ellen  Bradshaw,  but  she  couldn't  resist,  even  in  her  anx- 
iety, springing  that  surprise  upon  him  when  he  heard  her 
speaking  the  tongue  of  Staithley  on  the  stage.  He  might 
know  already,  he  might  have  seen  the  piece.  She  wasn't 
unsophisticated  enough  to  suppose  that  Labor  members 
were  any  more  austere  in  their  recreations  than  other  peo- 
ple, but  Tom  wasn't  likely  to  frequent  musical  comedy. 
He  liked  music. 

She  went  to  the  theater  for  the  tickets,  enclosed  them 
with  her  letter  and  took  it  to  the  House  of  Commons, 
where  she  was  assured  that  Tom  would  certainly  receive  it 
during  the  day.  That  was  comforting  as  far  as  it  went, 
and  what  went  further  was  that  both  policemen  of  whom 
she  enquired  in  the  precincts  of  the  House  addressed  her 
as  "Miss  Arden."  There  are  people  who  do  not  gain 
confidence  by  finding  themselves  known  to  the  police. 
Mary  was  helped  just  then  to  be  reminded  that  she  was 
famous. 

She  had  conquered  London ;  surely  she  could  conquer 
Rupert  Hepplestall. 

Reading  her  letter,  Tom  couldn't  imagine  what  need  she 
had  of  him  in  that  galley,  but  the  Coalition  could  coalesce 
without  his  opposition  for  an  hour  or  two  that  afternoon, 
and  he  might  as  well  go  and  see  what  was  perturbing 
her  play-acting  Ladyship. 

He  followed  instructions,  went  to  the  front  of  the  house 
and  asked  Rossiter's  impressive  attendant  if  Miss  Arden 
was  at  that  moment  on  the  stage.  "Mr.  Bradshaw,  Sir?'* 
He  was,  and  a  surprised  and  flattered  Mr.  Bradshaw  by 
the  time  the  Galaxy  staff  had  ushered  him  to  his  stall  with 


280  HEPPLESTALL'S 

the  superlative  deference  shown  to  those  about  whom  they 
had  special  instructions.  He  was  not  royalty,  and  he  was 
not  received  by  Mr.  Rossiter,  but  he  was  Miss  Arden's 
guest  and  the  technique  of  his  welcome  was  based  accu- 
rately on  that  of  Hubert  Rossiter  receiving  royalty. 

As  a  Labor  Member  he  ought,  properly,  to  have  scowled 
at  flunkeydom ;  he  ought  to  have  bristled  at  the  full  house, 
at  the  sight  of  so  many  people  idle  in  the  afternoon ;  and 
he  did  neither  of  these  reasonable  things.  He  was  in  the 
Galaxy,  and,  besides,  he  was  looking  at  the  stage  and  on 
a  bit  of  authentic  Lancashire  on  the  stage.  "Yon  wench 
is  the  reet  stuff,"  he  thought,  slipping  mentally  back  into 
the  vernacular.  "By  gum,  she  is."  She  was  remarkably 
the  right  stuff;  if  his  car  went  for  anytliing,  she  was 
Staithley  stuff.  That  must  be  why  she  seemed  familiar  to 
him  as  if  he  had  met  her,  or  somebody  very  like  her.  But 
he  decided  that  he  hadn't  met  her ;  he  had  only  met  typical 
Lancashire  women,  and  this  was  the  sublimation  of  the 
type.  She  finished  her  scene  and  left  the  stage.  An  at- 
tendant was  murmuring  softly  to  him.  Would  he  go 
round  and  see  Miss  Arden  now.'* 

Tom  pulled  himself  together.  A  queer  place,  the 
theater,  making  a  man  forget  so  completely  that  he  was 
there  on  business.  It  dawned  upon  him  that  this  Lan- 
cashire witch  he  had  gazed  at  with  such  absorbed  appre- 
ciation was  Mary  Arden,  Lady  Hepplestall.  "If  she 
wants  anything  of  me  that's  mine  to  give,  it's  hers  for 
the  asking,"  he  thought,  as  he  followed  his  guide,  still 
chuckling  intimately  at  the  racy  flavor  of  her;  no  bad 
compliment  to  an  actress  who  was  thinking  that  day  of 
anything  but  acting. 

She  awaited  him  in  her  room  unchanged,  in  the  clogs 
and  shawl  of  the  first  act,  which  were  not  very  different, 
except  in  cleanliness,  from  the  clothes  Mrs.  Butterworth 
had  burned. 


MARY  ARDEN'S  HUSBAND  281 

"Well,  Mr.  Bradshaw,"  she  greeted  him,  "and  who  am 
I?" 

"Who  are  you?     Wlij,  Lady  Hepplestall." 

"You've  seen  me  from  the  front,  haven't  3"ou?  And 
you  didn't  know  me?  I'm  safer  than  I  thought  I  was. 
Will  it  help  you  if  I  mention  Walter  Pate?" 

It  didn't;  he  saw  nothing  in  this  splendid  woman  to 
take  him  back  to  the  starveling  waif  whom  Pate  and  he 
adopted  or  to  the  crude,  if  physically  more  developed,  girl 
he  had  seen  on  one  or  two  later  occasions  at  Staithley. 
Mary  relished  his  bewilderment:  if  Rupert  made  seriously 
the  point  against  going  to  Staithley  that  she  was  Brad- 
shaw,  here  was  apt  confirmation  of  her  reply  that  nobody 
would  know  her.  Tom  Bradshaw  saw  her  in  clogs  and 
shawl  and  did  not  know  her.  She  hummed  a  bar  or  two  of 
"Lead  Kindly  Light." 

"Mary  Ellen !"  he  cried.  "Yes,  I  ought  to  have  seen 
it.  But  Lady  Hepplestall  to  Mary  Ellen  Bradshaw.  It's 
a  long  way  to  look." 

*'And  you  don't  much  care  to  look?  Not  at  that 
thankless  girl  who  bolted." 

But  she  was  Lady  Hepplestall  and  she  was  the  artist, 
yes,  by  God,  the  artist,  who  had  gripped  him  magically 
five  minutes  ago.  He  could  not  see  her  as  a  Bradshaw. 
*'You've  traveled  far  since  then,"  he  said  ungrudgingly. 
*'I'm  proud  I  was  in  at  the  start." 

"I  wrote  to  you,"  she  said,  "because  I  wanted  help.  I 
don't  know  why  it  came  to  me  that  you  were  the  one  per- 
son who  could  help  and  even  when  I  wrote  I  saw  no  reason 
in  it.  No  reason  at  all.  Instinct,  perhaps.  We're  both 
Bradshaws,  and  he's  a  Hepplestall,  but  I'm  not  pretend- 
ing that  I  care  about  this  thing  except  as  it  concerns  my 
husband.  I  do  think  it  concerns  a  lot  of  other  people, 
but  I  don't  care  for  them.  I  don't  care  if  it's  good  or  bad 
for  them,  and  this  is  just  a  matter  between  my  husband 


282  HEPPLESTALL'S 


and  myself.     You  see  how  little  reason  I  have  to  suppose 
that  you'll  do  anything." 

"The  way  you're  putting  it  is  that  I'm  to  interfere  be- 
tween man  and  wife.  That's  a  mug's  game.  But  you 
can  go  on.     I'm  here  to  hear." 

"If  I  knew  that  mine  was  just  a  war  marriage,  I  think 
I'd  kill  myself.  It  isn't  yet,  but  he's  in  danger,  and  he 
can  be  saved.  It'll  save  him  if  he'll  go  to  Staithley  and 
take  up  his  work." 

"Hasn't  he  yet.?" 

"No :  he's  killing  time  in  London." 

He  looked  at  her,  wondering  if  he  could  accuse  her  of 
playing  the  Syren.  If  Mary  Ellen  piped,  a  man  would 
dance  to  her  tune  and  small  blame  to  him  either;  but  he 
couldn't  assume  that  she  was  holding  Rupert  in  London 
when  it  was  she  who  saw  salvation  for  him  in  Staithley. 
If  he  had  to  take  a  side,  he  took  hers  so  far  as  to  say,  "A 
work-shy  Hepplestall  is  something  new." 

"You're  thinking  that  it's  my  fault,"  she  said.  "You're 
thinking  of  me  that  first  time  you  met  Mary  Ellen. 
You're  thinking  of  her  *  'A  'ate  th'''Epplestalls.'  " 

"I  did  think  of  it,"  he  admitted.  "Then  I  thought 
again.     He  ought  to  be  in  Staithley." 

"And  he's  on  his  way  there  now  to  sell  Hepplestall's." 

"What!"  said  Tom,  rising  to  his  feet,  with  his  hand 
tugging  at  his  collar  as  a  flush,  almost  apoplectic,  dis- 
colored his  neck.     "What !     Sell  Hepplestall's  !" 

She  told  him  of  the  letters.  "And  you  thought  it  was 
no  business  of  mine?"  he  said.  "You  saw  no  reason  in 
sending  for  me?  Instinct,  eh!  Well,  thank  God  for  in- 
stinct then.  Sell  Hepplestall's!  By  God,  they  won't. 
Who  to?  To  a  damned  syndicate,  that  offers  through  a 
London  accountant?  Londoners  !  outsiders !  Know-noth- 
ing grab-alls  that  have  the  same  idea  of  Trades  Unions 
as  they  have  of  Ireland.     There's  been  too  much  of  this 


MARY  ARDEN'S  HUSBAND  283 

selling  of  Lancashire  to  pirates,  and  happen  Labor's  been 
dull  about  it,  and  all.  But  Hepplestall's.  I  didn't 
think  they'd  go  for  Hepplestall's.  That's  big  business,  if 
jou  like ;  that's  swallowing  the  camel  but  they're  not  to  do 
it,  Mary,  and  if  you  want  to  know  who'll  stop  them,  I 
will."  He  was  racing  up  and  down  her  room,  not  like  a 
caged  tiger  wliich  only  paces,  but  like  an  angry  man  who 
tries  to  move  his  legs  in  time  with  rushing  thought. 
"Ugh !  you  don't  know  what  you've  done,  letting  this  cat 
out  of  the  bag.  I'll  be  careful  for  your  sake,  but  I  tell 
you  I'm  tempted  to  be  careless.  Would  you  like  to  know 
what  they  called  me  in  the  Times  the  other  day?  An 
Elder  Statesman  of  the  Labor  Party.  That  means  I've 
gone  to  sleep,  with  toothless  jaws  that  couldn't  bite  a 
millionaire  if  I  caught  his  hand  in  my  pocket.  It  means 
I'm  a  harmless  fossil  and  you  can  bet  your  young  life  the 
bright  lads  of  the  advanced  movement  that  think  Tom 
Bradshaw  lives  by  selling  passes  are  on  to  that  damned 
phrase.  If  I  go  down  to  Staithley  and  call  the  young 
crowd  together  and  tell  them  this,  I  could  blossom  into 
an  idol  of  the  lads.  They're  ready  for  any  lead,  but  it'ud 
let  hell  loose  in  Lancashire  and  I'll  not  do  it  if  I  can  find 
another  way.  I'll  be  an  elder  statesman,  but  if  the  Hep- 
plestalls  don't  like  my  British  statesmanship,  by  God,  I'll 
give  'em  Russian.  I'll  show  them  there's  to  be  an  end  of 
this  buying  and  selling  Labor  like  cattle." 

Mary  sat  overwhelmed  by  the  spate  she  had  provoked; 
she  hadn't  dreamed  that  she  would  so  strangely  touch  him 
on  the  raw,  and  he,  too,  sat,  shaken,  hiding  his  face  in  his 
hands  on  her  dressing-table.  Presently  he  looked  up,  and 
she  saw  that  the  storm  had  passed.  "I'm  an  old  fool," 
he  said,  "ranting  like  a  boy.  But  I'm  upset.  I  didn't 
think  it  of  the  Hepplestalls.  This  lad  of  yours  .  .  . 
what  would  Sir  Philip  have  thought  of  him  ?" 

She  was  fighting  Rupert,  and  Tom  Bradshaw  was  the 


284  HEPPLESTALL'S 

ally  she  had  called  to  help  her,  but  she  was  stung  to  seek 
defense  for  him.  "Sir  Philip  did  not  go  through  the  war, 
as  Rupert  did,"  she  said.  "All  that's  the  matter  with 
Rupert  is  that  he  is  still — stOl  rather  demobilized." 

"Post-war,"  groaned  Tom.  "I  know.  It's  the  word 
for  evervtliing  that's  deteriorated:  but  Hepplestall's 
shan't  go  post-war." 

She  spoke  of  William,  and.  "Ave."  he  agreed.  "I  know 
"William.  William's  weak — for  a  Hepplestall.  Well,  it's 
those  two  then.  Your  spark  and  William.  I  think  I  can 
do  it,  ^lary.  They  meet  to-morrow,  eh?  Well,  it  won't 
be  the  duet  they  think  it  will.  It  will  be  a  trio  and  I'D  be 
singing  to  a  tune  of  my  own." 

"If,"  said  Mary,  "it  isn't  a  quart^tt^.  I'm  coming 
with  Tou.     It'll  make  mj  understudy  grateful,  anyhow  " 


CHAPTER  X 


THE   PEAK   IN    DARIEN 


RUPERT  was  annoyed,  and  annoyed  with  himself  for 
being  annoyed,  when  he  drove  up  to  the  main  gate 
of  Staithley  Mills  on  the  following  afternoon  and  found 
that  the  gate-keeper  did  not  know  him.  It  was  plainly 
the  man's  duty  to  warn  strangers  off  the  premises,  and 
Rupert  was,  by  hypothesis  and  in  fact,  a  stranger,  but 
he  felt  it  a  reproach  that  Sir  Rupert  Hepplestall  was 
forced  to  make  himself  known  to  Hepplestall's  gate-keeper. 
The  man,  an  old  workman,  who  preferred  tliis  mildly 
honorific  wardenship  to  a  pension,  made  him  a  back- 
handed apology.  "It's  so  long  sin'  we've  seen  thee,"  he 
said.  "Us  had  a  hoam-coming  ready  for  thee  arter  the 
war,  but  tlia'  didno  come."  No  sirring  and  no  obsequious- 
ness from  this  old  servant  of  the  firm,  and  Rupert  gave  a 
quick,  resentful  glance  as  he  pulled  the  car  up  in  the 
yard. 

Then  he  remembered  that  this  was  Lancashire — and 
he  knew  now  what  Lancashire  thought  of  him.  There  was 
no  reason  why  he  should,  and  every  reason  why  he  should 
not,  care  what  Lancashire  thought,  seeing  that  he  came 
there  solely  to  arrange  his  clean  cut  from  Staithley ;  but 
an  old  fellow  in  a  factory  yard  who  did  not  scrape,  but 
told  him  frankly  that  he  had  not  come  up  to  local  expec- 
tations, had  been  able  to  thwack  him  shrewdly. 

It  was  not  much  better  after  that  to  be  treated  like  a 

prodigal,  to  be  conducted  possessively   to  the  office  en- 

285 


286  HEPPLESTALL'S 

trance  and  to  hear  the  gate-keeper  announce  in  a  great 
and  genial  voice,  "I've  a  glad  surprise  for  yo*.  There's 
th'  young  mai&ter." 

He  was  not  and  he  refused  to  be  *'th'  young  maister,'* 
but  he  could  not  explain  to  this  guide  that  he  wasn't  what 
he  seemed ;  the  infernal  fellow  was  so  naively  proud  to  be 
his  herald.  "I  feel  like  Judas,"  he  thought,  and  tried 
wryly  to  laugh  the  thought  away.  It  was  a  tremendous 
and  a  preposterous  simile  to  be  occasioned  by  the  candid 
loyalty  of  one  old  workman,  but  things  did  not  go  much 
better  with  him  inside  the  offices. 

Theoretically,  they  should  have  shrunk,  to  his  maturer 
gaze,  from  his  boyish  recollection  of  them,  but  they  were 
authentically   impressive.     He   couldn't  think  lightly   of 
this  regiment  of  desks,  nor  could  he  pretend  that  the  eyes 
which  turned  towards  him   as   his  loud-voiced  pilot   an- 
nounced   him,   were    hostile.     Theory   was    in    chancery 
again;  all  employees  ought  to  hate  all  employers,  but  the 
elderly  gentlemen  who  were  hastening  towards  him  wore 
on  their  faces  expressions  of  genuine  pleasure  instead  of 
the  decent  deference  that  might  cloak  a  mortal  hatred. 
Ridiculously  as  if  he  had  been  indeed  a  prince  on  the  day 
■when  Sir  Philip  took  him  round  and  introduced  him,  he 
discovered  a  royal  memory,  and  remembered  their  names. 
It  was  developing  into   a  reception ;  this   wasn't   at   all 
"what  he  had  come  for.     He  wondered  what  the  younger 
clerks  were  thinking,  men  of  his  own  age,  ex-ser^^ce  men, 
but  he  had  not  the  chance  even  to  look  at  them.     A  posi- 
tive guard  of  honor  was  escorting  him  to  William's  room, 
that  joss-house  of  the  Hepplestalls. 

If  only  he  could  laugh  at  their  formality  and  at  their 
quaint  appreciativeness  of  his  knowing  their  names !  He 
felt  he  ought  to  laugh ;  he  felt  it  was  all  something  out  of 
Dickens.  Or  if  he  could  blurt  out  that  he  had  come  to 
slip  the  collar  for  ever  from  his  neck !     They  would  scuttle 


THE  PEAK  IN  DARIEN  287 

from  him  as  though  he  were  the  plague;  but  he  could 
neither  laugh  aloud  nor  tell  the  truth  to  those  solemn 
mandarins.  They  were  not  pompous  fools,  or  he  could 
have  laughed,  he  could  have  scattered  them  impishly  with 
his  truth;  but  they  were  captains  in  a  Service  where  pro- 
motion went  by  merit,  they  were  proven  efficients  in  an 
organization  whose  efficiency  was  world-renowned,  and 
their  homage  was  not  absurd  because  it  was  paid  not  to 
the  young  man,  Rupert  Hepplestall,  but  to  Sir  Philip's 
son,  to  the  successor  to  the  Headship  of  the  Service. 
That  made  it  the  more  hypocritical  in  him  to  seem  to  ac- 
cept their  homage,  but  if  he  was  going  to  forfeit  what 
good  opinion  they  retained  of  a  truant,  he  was  going  to 
keep  it,  at  any  rate,  until  the  die  was  unalterably  cast. 

It  was  certain  to  be  cast,  but  Hcpplestall*s  was  retort- 
ing on  him  with  unexpected  power.  Mary  was  right:  the 
bigness  of  Hepplestall's  had  been  escaping  him.  From 
London  the  sale  had  seemed  no  more  than  signatures  on 
documents,  and  a  check.  Up  here,  confronted  with 
Staithley  Mills  as  so  much  brick,  mortar  and  machinery, 
and  confronted  with  no  more  than  one  crude  loyalist  in 
the  yard  and  half  a  dozen  graybeards  of  the  Service  in  the 
office,  the  thing  loomed  colossal.  Let  it  loom :  he  held  its 
future  in  the  hollow  of  his  hand,  and  this,  of  all  times,  was 
no  moment  for  second  thoughts.  He  had  to  tackle  Wil- 
liam, the  waverer,  the  fence-sitter  who  must  be  met  with 
firmness,  and  not  by  one  who  was  himself  momentarily 
awed  by  the  bigness  of  Hepplestall's  into  being  a  waverer. 
With  the  air  of  nailing  his  colors  to  the  mast,  even  if  they 
were  the  skull  and  crossbones,  he  recovered  his  resolution 
in  the  moment  when  that  ambassadorial  figure,  the  Chief 
Cashier  of  Hepplestall's,  threw  open  William's  door  and 
announced  "Sir  Rupert  Hepplestall" ;  and  a  grave  assur- 
ance, inflexible  and  self-reliant,  seemed  to  enter  the  room 
with  him. 


288  HEPPLESTALL'S 

William  raised  careworn  eyes  as  this  bright  incarnation 
of  sanguine  jouth  came  into  the  office  in  which  he  sat  al- 
most as  if  it  were  a  condemned  cell.  He  knew,  better  than 
Rupert  who  knew  the  Hepplestalls  so  little,  what  wrath 
would  come  when  they  two  faced  an  outraged  Board,  and 
this  sedate,  this  almost  smiling  confidence  seemed  to  him 
as  offensive  as  buffoonery  at  a  funeral.  "You  look  very 
cheerful,"  he  greeted  his  nephew  resentfully. 

"Why  not?"  said  Rupert.  "It's  a  mistake  to  call  opti- 
mism a  cheap  virtue.     How  are  you,  Uncle?" 

"I  suppose  you  slept  last  night,"  was  the  reply  from 
which  Rupert  was  to  gather  that  sleep  at  such  a  crisis 
was  considered  gross. 

"Yes,  thanks,"  he  said.  "At  Matlock.  I  drove  up 
quietly,  because  I  wanted  to  think.  Really,  of  course,  I'd 
decided  in  the  first  five  minutes  after  opening  3'our  letter." 

*'You  decided  very  quickly,"  said  William,  who  had 
come  to  no  decision. 

"My  wife  made  the  same  remark,"  said  Rupert.  **But 
that's  a  day  and  a  half  ago,  and  my  first  opinion  stands. 
I've  decided  to  sell."  Speaking,  he  gave  a  just  percepti- 
ble jerk  of  the  head  which  William  remembered  as  a  char- 
acteristic of  Sir  Philip  when  he,  too,  announced  one  of  his 
quick  decisions,  and  the  little  movement  was  not  a  grateful 
sight  to  William.  Sir  Philip's  son  had  his  father's  trick 
and,  it  seemed,  his  father's  way  of  arriving  rapidly  at  a 
conclusion.  William,  victim  to  irresolution  as  he  always 
was,  was  sliding  off  his  fence  into  opposition,  through 
nothing  more  logical  than  jealousy  of  this  boy  who  had 
the  gift  of  making  up  his  mind  swiftly.  "Am  I  to  under- 
stand that  your  wife  has  other  views?"  he  asked.  It  was 
hardly  likely  in  such  a  wife,  in  an  actress,  but  Rupert's 
words  seemed  to  suggest  that  Mary  had  given  him  pause, 
and  if  William  was  going  to  oppose  this  headstrong  boy, 
any  ally,  however  unlikely,  would  be  welcome. 


THE  PEAK  IN  DARIEN  289 

But,  "Wives  don't  count  in  this,"  said  Rupert  bruskly, 
and,  he  thought,  truthfully.  It  was  true  at  any  rate  be- 
tween Rupert  and  the  wife  of  William;  Rupert's  decision 
had  been  made  before  he  opened  Gertrude's  prompting 
letter.  But  William  and  William's  wife  were  another 
matter,  and  William  shuffled  uneasily  on  his  chair  as  he 
admitted  the  influence  in  this  crisis  of  the  Service  of  Ger- 
trude who  was  not  bora  a  Hepplestall.  He  must  be 
strong. 

"Quite  right,"  he  said  firmly.  "Wives  don't  count. 
But  it  isn't  the  case  that  you  decide,  Rupert.  The  Board 
decides." 

"I  make  it  from  your  letter  that  for  the  practical  pur- 
poses of  tliis  deal,  you  and  I  decide." 

"It  still  is  not  the  case  that  you  decide." 

"Oh,  naturally,  when  I  said  I'd  decided,  I  meant  as  re- 
gards myself.  I'm  here  to  get  your  views.  But,  even  if 
you're  against  me,  Uncle,  that  won't  stop  me  from  going 
on.  I  mean  there  may  be  others  who  aren't  romantic 
about  Hepplestall's.  I  may  find  others  who'll  pool  their 
shares  with  mine  in  favor  of  a  sale." 

William  inclined  to  tell  him  to  go  and  try.  He  didn't 
think  it  likely  that  there  would  be  any  others,  but  if  there 
were,  let  them  join  with  Rupert  and  let  William  be  able 
to  say  that  his  hand  was  forced.  It  would  be  a  comfort- 
ing solution. 

"You're  hoping  it.  Uncle.  I'm  perfectly  aware  you 
■want  to  sell.  Why  did  you  write  to  me  at  all  if  you  didn't 
want  to  sell?" 

*'Is  that  fair,  Rupert  .f*  You  would  have  been  the  first 
to  blame  me  if  I  had  not  told  you  of  this." 

"I  should  never  have  known  anything  about  it.  I  know 
nothing  of  lots  of  important  things  you  decide." 

"And  doesn't  that  seem  a  shameful  thing  for  your 
father's  son  to  have  to  say,  Rupert?     Suppose  I  sent  you 


290  HEPPLESTALL'S 

that  letter  just  to  make  you  see  what  sort  of  important 
things  we  had  to  decide  in  jour  absence.  To  arouse  your 
sense  of  responsibility." 

"That  cock  won't  fight,  Uncle.  You  could  decide  other 
things  very  well  without  me.  You  could  decide  this,  too, 
if  the  decision  were  a  negative.  But  the  decision  you  hoped 
for  was  an  affirmative  and  so  you  wrote  to  me.  Are  you 
going  to  deny  that  3'ou  hoped  I'd  want  to  sell?'* 

"You're    .  .  .  you're  very  headstrong,  Rupert.'* 

*'I've  come  here  to  get  down  to  facts.  And  the  flat  fact 
is  that  both  you  and  I  want  to  sell.  You  want  more 
pleasure  in  life  than  being  Head  of  HepplestalPs  allows 
you.  You  want  to  get  out  and  I  don't  mean  to  get  in. 
We  both  know  that  from  the  point  of  view  of  those  old 
Johnnies  on  the  wall" — William  shuddered  at  his  catas- 
trophic levity — "it's  a  crime  to  sell  Hcpplestall's.  But 
I'm  not  a  Chinaman  and  I  won't  worship  my  ancestors. 
I've  my  own  view  of  the  sort  of  life  I  mean  to  live.  And 
we  both  know  that  the  whole  of  the  rest  of  the  Board  may 
be  against  us  and  that  some  of  them  \'irulently  will.  Very 
well,  then  we  don't  tell  the  Board  before  it's  necessary. 
We  go  into  the  question  of  price,  and  we  quote  the  figure 
to  these  accountants.  We  see  what  reply  we  draw.  As  to 
the  price,  that's  j'our  afTair." 

"Well,"  confessed  William,  "tentatively,  purely  as  a 
matter  of  curiosity,  I  have  gone  into  that." 

"Uncle,"  said  Rupert,  surprising  William  with  a  giant's 
hand-grip,  "you  and  I  speak  the  same  language.  And  we 
won't  stammer,  either.  These  accountants  wrote  to  you, 
so  the  reply  must  be  from  you.  You  have  not  had  an 
opportunity  to  consult  3'our  Board  and  you  speak  for 
yourself  in  estimating  the  market  value  of  Hepplestall's  at 
so  much.  This  figure  should  not  be  regarded  as  the  basis 
of  negotiation,  but  as  the  minimum  financial  consideration 
on  which  other  terms  of  sale  could  be  founded.     Some- 


THE  PEAK  IN  DARIEN  291 

thing  like  that,  eh?  Now  show  me  the  figure  and  tell  me 
how  you  arrived  at  it." 

From  nephew  to  uncle,  this  did  not  strain  courtesy;  it 
was  hot  pace-making  irresistibly  recalling  to  William  oc- 
casions when  Sir  Philip,  well  in  his  stride,  had  made  him 
wonder  whether  such  alert  efficiency  was  quite  gentlemanly. 
But  with  the  figures  in  his  pocket  he  had  been  no  sloven 
himself,  and  if  Rupert  and  he  did  indeed  speak  the  same 
language,  he  hadn't  stammered. 

At  the  same  time,  this  production  of  the  figures,  to  one 
so  pertinacious  as  Rupert,  advanced  matters  to  a  stage 
from  which  there  was  no  retreat  and  he  hesitated  until  a 
thought,  sophistical  but  consoling,  came  into  his  mind. 
He  had  heard  it  rumored  that  the  Banks  were  beginning 
to  frown  on  the  excessive  speculation  in  mills ;  of  course, 
and  time,  too.  The  Government  had  cried,  "Trade! 
Trade!"  and  had  inspired  the  Banks  to  encourage  trade 
by  lending  money  readily.  Then  it  was  found  that  too 
much  of  the  money  lent  was  being  used  not  for  sound  trade 
but  for  speculation,  and  borrowers  were  faced  with  a  de- 
cided change  of  front  on  the  part  of  bank  managers. 
William  conveniently  forgot  that  the  type  of  rich  man 
behind  the  accountants  who  had  written  to  him  would  be 
above  the  caprice  of  bank  managers,  and  decided  happily 
that  the  whole  affair  had  merely  an  academic  interest ;  in 
that  case,  there  was  no  harm  in  discussing  the  figures  with 
Rupert  behind  the  backs  of  the  rest  of  the  Board,  and  in 
submitting  them  to  London.  The  nationally  eminent  ac- 
countants would  have  been  infuriated  to  know  that  William 
Hepplestall  imagined  them  capable  of  ha\nng  to  do  with  a 
mare's-nest ;  but  that  it  was  all  a  mare's-nest  was  the  salve 
he  applied  to  his  conscience  as  he  went  to  the  safe  to  col- 
lect his  data  for  Rupert. 

Rupert  had  no  sophistical  conclusions  to  draw  from  a 
general  situation  of  which  he  knew  nothing;  it  was  clear 


292  HEPPLESTALL'S 

to  him  that  they  had  passed  the  turning-point  and  were 
safely  on  the  tack  for  home.  There  would  be  any  amount 
of  detail  to  be  settled,  but  the  supreme  issue  was  decided ; 
William  and  he  were  at  one,  and  Hepplestall's  was  to  be 
sold!  No  wonder  he  had  hectored  a  little.  He  had  had 
to  rout  William  and  not  only  William  but  the  belated 
hesitations  in  himself  born  of  his  dismay  at  the  formidable 
size  of  Hepplestall's ;  and  success  had  justified  his  methods. 
In  here,  the  massiveness  of  the  mills  did  not  oppress  and 
a  modern  man  whose  thinking  was  not  confused  by  the  por- 
traits of  his  ancestors  could  see  this  thing  singly,  stripped 
of  sentiment,  in  terms  of  pounds,  shillings  and  pence.  If 
StaitlJey  Mills  were  large,  so  would  be  the  figure  William 
was  to  declare ;  if  the  tradition  was  fine,  it  was  commutable 
into  the  greater  number  of  thousands.  That  was  sanity, 
anything  else  was  muddled-headedness,  and  he  awaited 
William's  scratches  on  paper  as  one  who  has  swept  away 
obfuscating  side-issues  and  concentrates  on  essentials. 

"It  makes  a  very  considerable  total,  Rupert,"  said  Wil- 
liam gravely. 

"We've  got  used  to  considerable  totals,  haven't  we.-*  I 
don't  suppose  it's  more  than  a  day's  cost  of  the  war." 

"Then  I've  a  surprise  for  you,"  said  William. 

"Yes?"  asked  Rupert  with  an  eager  anticipation  which 
was  hardly  due  to  greed  so  much  as  to  impatience  to  learn 
what  fabulous  key  to  the  pageant  of  life  was  to  be  his  to 
turn.  Let  it  only  be  big  enough  and  he  had  no  doubt  that 
it  would  dazzle  Mary  out  of  her  queer,  old-fashioned 
timidities.  He  stood  upon  his  peak  in  Darien.  "Yes," 
he  asked  again  as  William  paused,  not  because  he  had  a 
sense  of  the  dramatic  but  because  he  was  nervous. 

There  was  a  knock  at  the  door,  apologetic  if  ever  knock 
apologized,  and  an  embarrassed  henchman  of  the  Service 
came  in  upon  William's  indignant  response. 


THE  PEAK  IN  DARIEN  293 

"I  wouldn't  dream  of  disturbing  you,  sir,  but  Lady 
Hepplestall  is  here." 

"My  wife?"  cried  Rupert,  hoping  against  hope  that  it 
was  his  mother. 

"Yes,  Sir  Rupert,  and  Bradshaw's  with  her.  Mr. 
Bradshaw  of  the  spinners.  The  M.  P.  He  .  .  .  well, 
sir,  he  put  it  that  he  knew  you  didn't  want  to  be  inter- 
rupted and  he's  come  to  interrupt." 

"Thank  you,"  said  William.  "We  will  not  keep  Lady 
Hepplestall  waiting."  William  was  very  dignified  as  he 
said  the  only  possible  thing,  and  he  hoped  Rupert  would 
perceive  in  his  dignity  a  reproach  to  his  own  exliibition  of 
crude  amazement  before  an  understrapper.  Rupert  was 
ludicrously  like  a  boy  caught  in  the  act  of  robbing  an 
orchard,  and  William's  eye  was  alight  as  he  contrasted 
this  crestfallen  Rupert  with  the  Rupert  who  had  declared 
roundly  that  "Wives  don't  count  in  this."  William  had 
hopes  of  Mary,  who  was  shown  in  with  Tom  before  Rupert 
had  time  to  attempt  an  explanation  of  her  presence  to  his 
uncle. 

Rupert  recovered  himself  and  made  a  tolerable  show  of 
hauteur ;  he  wasn't  the  small  boy  in  the  apple  orchard  but 
a  very  grand  gentleman  making  his  pained  protest  at  her 
intrusion.     "Mary !"  he  began. 

"No,  not  now,  Rupert,"  she  checked  him.  "I'm  here 
to  watch.  I  told  Mr.  Bradshaw  and  he  is  here  to  speak." 
To  watch,  she  did  not  add,  with  desperately  anxious  eyes 
the  effect  upon  him  both  of  her  summons  to  Tom  and  of 
what  Tom  had  to  say.  She  thought  she  had  saved  Hej>- 
plestall's,  she  thought  Tom  had  a  medicine  that  would 
cure  them  of  their  wish  to  sell,  but  had  she  saved  Rupert.'* 
That  was  her  larger  question  and  she  saw  no  answer  to 
it  yet.      She  was  there  to  watch  and  pray. 

"Well,"  said  Tom,  "that's  a  good  opening.     As  she 


294  HEPPLESTALL'S 

says,  Lady  Hepplestall  told  me  what  you're  up  to  and 
we're  saved  the  trouble  of  bluffing  round  the  point. 
You're  out  to  sell  Hepplestall's ;  I'm  here  to  stop  you." 

"The  devil  you  are,"  cried  Rupert. 

Tom  turned  to  William.  "Does  Sir  Rupert  know  I'm 
secretary  of  the  Spinners'  Union  ?"  he  asked. 

"Indeed?"  said  Rupert.  "And  what  business  may  this 
be  of  the  Spinners'  Union,  or  any  other  Union?" 

"Vital  business,"  said  Tom,  "of  theirs  and  every  other 
cotton  trade  Union.  I'm  usually  asked  to  sit  down  in  this 
office,  Mr.  Hepplestall." 

"You  are  usually  asked  to  come  into  it,  Mr.  Bradshaw. 
You  have  hardly  asked  to-day,"  said  William. 

"Please  yourself,"  said  Tom.  "I've  been  sitting  a  long 
while  in  the  train.  I  can  stand,  only  I've  a  bad  habit  of 
making  speeches  when  I'm  on  my  feet  and  I'd  as  lief  have 
had  this  friendly." 

It  surprised  and  annoyed  Rupert  that  William  pointed 
to  a  chair  with  an  "If  you  please,  Mr.  Bradshaw.'*  Him- 
self, he  would  have  kicked  the  confounded  fellow  into  the 
street  and  when  he  had  gone  it  would  have  been  Mary's 
turn  for — not  for  kicking,  certainly,  but  for  something 
severe  in  the  way  of  disciplinary  measures.  "Friendly!" 
he  scoffed. 

"What  you  might  call  a  benevolent  enemy,  Sir  Rupert," 
said  Tom.  "If  I  weren't  benevolent,  I'd  have  gone  into 
Staithley  streets  and  cried  it  aloud  that  Hepplestall's 
was  being  sold  to  Londoners,  and  I'd  have  watched  the 
hornets  sting  you.  But,  being  benevolent,  I'd  rather  you 
didn't  get  stung,  and  I'm  here  till  I  get  your  assurance 
that  all  thought  of  a  sale  is  off." 

"That  means  you're  making  quite  a  long  stay  with  us, 
Mr.  Bradshaw,"  said  Rupert  elaborately. 

"I  wonder  how  much  you  know  of  the  Staithley  folk, 
Sir  Rupert,"  said  Tom.     "They're  fighting  stock.     You 


THE  PEAK  IN  DARIEN  296 

maybe  know  there's  a  likely  chance  of  things  coming  to  a 
big  strike  in  the  cotton  trade  on  the  wages  question,  but 
that's  not  just  yet  and  if  you  don't  watch  it  there'll  be  an 
urgency  strike  in  Staithley  that  might  begin  to-night. 
One  of  these  wicked  strikes  you  read  about.  Without 
notice.'* 

"But  you  .  .  .  Mr.  Bradshaw,  you're  the  chief  Union 
official." 

"Oh,  yes,"  said  Tom,  "and  officially  the  strike  would  be 
unofficial.  But  I'd  be  roundabout,  unofficially.  Rum 
sort  of  strike,  eh?  Striking  against  the  Hepplestalls  for 
the  Hepplestalls,  and  a  Bradshaw  leading  it.  If  you 
knew  owt  of  Bradshaws  and  Hepplestalls,  you'll  see  the 
rumminess  of  that." 

"Against  us  for  us.  Yes,  I  see.  One  might  almost 
conclude  you  like  the  Hepplestalls,  Mr.  Bradshaw." 

"Like  'em !"  said  Tom.  "Like  'em !"  His  eyes  glanced 
at  William  with  the  suspicion  of  a  twinkle  in  it.  William 
wondered  if  there  was  a  twinkle ;  Sir  Philip  would  not  have 
wondered,  he  would  have  seen  and  he  would  have  under- 
stood. He  would  have  discounted  Tom's  next  words,  "I 
take  the  liberty  of  telling  you  the  Hepplestalls  are  a  thiev- 
ing gang  of  blood-sucking  capitalists,  but  I  prefer  to  stick 
to  the  blood-suckers  I  know.  I  know  the  Hepplestalls 
and  I  can  talk  to  them.  I  don't  know,  I  won't  talk  to  a 
soulless  mob  of  a  London  syndicate.  You  can  think  of  it 
like  this.  Sir  Rupert.  There  was  steam,  and  it  fastened 
like  a  vampire  on  Lancashire.  It  fastened  on  your  sort 
as  well  as  on  my  sort,  and  we've  been  working  up  to  where 
we're  getting  steam  in  its  place,  obeying  us,  not  master- 
ing us.  We're  doing  well  against  steam.  Shorter  hours 
are  here,  and  factory  work  before  breakfast  has  gone. 
Half-timers  are  going,  and  education's  going  to  get  a 
sporting  chance.  And  we're  not  beating  steam  to  let  our- 
selves be  ruined  by  water." 


296  HEPPLESTALL'S 

William  nodded  sober  acquiescence,  but  Rupert  was  un- 
informed.    "Water?"  he  asked. 

"Watered  capital,"  Tom  explained.  "Lancashire's 
water-logged,  but  we'll  keep  Staithley  out  of  what's  com- 
ing to  Lancashire.  You  have  mills  here  that  are  the 
pflde  of  the  county.  You  wouldn't  turn  them  into  the 
pride  of  speculators  as  the  biggest  grab  they  ever  made 
in  Lancashire !  You  wouldn't  make  Staithley  suffer  from 
the  rot  of  watered  capital." 

William    stirred    furtively    on    his    chair   and    avoided 
Tom's  eye  with  the  shiftiness  of  a  wrongdoer  who  is  shown 
the  results  of  misdeed,  and  then  remembered  that  he  had 
done  no  wrong  and  nodded  approval  of  Tom's  words  which 
were  not  addressed  to  him  but  to  Rupert.     Mentally  he 
thanked  Tom  for  saying  outright  things  which  he   had 
himself  thought.     He  had  merely  kept  them  in  reserve, 
unspoken  until  he  had  entertained  himself  by  proceeding 
a  little  further  with  the  accountants ;  but  that  was,  per- 
haps,   not   the    most    honorable    form    of    entertainment, 
based  as  it  would  have  been  on  the  false  pretense  that 
William  was  prepared  to  sell,  and  he  was  grateful  to  Tom 
for  an  intrusion  which  cleared  the  air.     He  did  not  blame 
himself:  he  had  not  played  with  fire,  or,  if  he  had,  it  had 
been* while  wearing  asbestos  gloves;  but  what  Tom  said  to 
Rupert — of  course  It  was  to  Rupert — was  the  final  argu- 
ment against  a  sale,  and  he  drew  out  notepaper  and  bent 
to  write. 

To  Rupert,  Tom  was  simply  a  nuisance.  He  had 
sighted  victory,  he  had  carried  William,  he  had  resolutely 
defeated  such  difficulties  as  sentiment  and  the  frowning 
ponderosity  of  Hepplestall's,  and  he  saw  Tom  Bradshaw, 
with  his  croaking  prophecies  of  after-effects  of  the  sale 
upon  some  fifty  thousand  Inhabitants  of  Staithley,  as  a 
monstrous  impertinence.     He  was  so  busy  seeing  Tom  as 


THE  PEAK  IN  DARIEN  297 

an  impertinence  that  he  did  not  see  William  writing  a 
letter. 

"I've  heard  of  the  tyranny  of  Trade  Unions,"  he  said. 
"I've  heard  of  what  they  call  their  rights  and  what  most 
people  call  their  privileges.  But  I've  never  heard  of  a 
Trade  Union's  right  to  veto  a  sale.  I  have  the  right  to 
transfer  possession  of  my  own  to  an3^body.  If  you  think 
you  can  engineer  a  strike  against  that  elementary  right 
of  property,  I  tell  you  to  go  ahead  and  see  what  happens." 

"I  knovv^  what  will  happen  in  this  case,  Sir  Rupert.  If 
we  let  you  sell — " 

"You  let !     You  can't  prevent." 

"If  you  sold,"  Tom  Avent  on,  "some  undesirable  results 
would  arise.  I  am  dealing  with  them  before  they  arise. 
I  am  dealing  on  the  principle  that  prevention  is  better 
than  cure." 

"Are  you?  Then  suppose  I  said  strike  and  be  damned 
to  you?" 

"If  you  said  that  you  would  be  a  young  man  speaking 
in  anger  and  I  shouldn't  take  you  too  seriously." 

"What !"  cried  Rupert.     There  was  no  doubt  about  his 


anger  now. 


"One  moment,"  said  Tom.  "I'm  against  a  strike,  but 
it's  a  good  weapon.  It's  maybe  a  better  weapon  when  it 
isn't  used  than  when  it  is.  It  can  hit  the  striker  as  well 
as  the  struck." 

"Oh?     That's  dawned  on  you,  has  it?'* 

"Some  time  before  you  were  born.  But  this  strike 
wouldn't  hurt  the  striker.  There's  somebody  ready  to 
buy  Hepplestall's.  I'll  call  him  Mr.  B.,  because  B  stands 
for  butcher,  and  a  butcher  will  bu}'  a  bull  but  he  won't 
buy  a  mad  bull.  Mr.  B.  will  think  twice  before  he  buys 
Hepplestall's  when  Hepplestall's  men  are  on  strike  against 
being   sold.     No    one   buys   trouble   with   his   eyes    open. 


298  HEPPLESTALL'S 

That's  why  we  can  stop  this.  That's  the  public  way,  but 
I've  still  great  hopes  we'll  stop  it  privately,  in  this  room." 

"Then  you — "  Rupert  began  hotly,  but  William  inter- 
rupted. "You  may  have  noticed  that  I  was  writing,  Mr. 
Bradshaw.  This  letter  goes  to-night  finally  declining  to 
treat  in  any  way  for  a  sale  of  Hepplestall's.  I  have 
signed  it  and  I  am  Head  of  Hepplestall's.  I  hope.  Sir 
Rupert,  the  future  Head  will  sign  it  with  me." 

"Uncle !"  he  said,  and  turned  his  back. 

"It  isn't  needful,"  said  Tom,  "for  me  to  add  that  no- 
body shall  ever  know  from  me  that  there  was  any  ques- 
tion of  a  sale." 

"Thank  you,"  said  William.  "As  a  fact,  Mr.  Brad- 
shaw, there  never  was."  He  believed  what  he  said,  too. 
He  believed  he  had  never  been  influenced  by  Gertrude  or 
convinced  by  Rupert.  He  believed  he  had  merely  toyed 
pleasantly  with  the  idea,  standing  himself  superior  to  it. 
"But  that  shall  not  prevent  me  from  appreciating  your 
actions,  yours,  Lady  Hepplestall,  and  yours,  Mr.  Brad- 
shaw. We  Hepplestalls  are  all  trustees,  all  of  us,"  he 
emphasized,  looking  at  Rupert's  stiff  back,  "but  you  have 
shown  to-day  that  you  are  sharer  in  the  trust." 

Tom  wondered  for  a  moment  what  was  the  polite  con- 
versational equivalent  of  ironical  cheers;  William  was 
escaping  too  easily,  but  the  chief  point  was  not  the  re- 
gent but  the  heir,  Mary's  Rupert,  and  he  could  spare 
William  the  knowledge  that  he  had  deceived  nobody. 

"Sir  Rupert  spoke  just  now,"  he  said,  "of  the  rights 
of  property.  They  are  rightful  rights  only  when  they  are 
matched  with  a  sense  of  responsibility,  and  capital  that 
forgets  responsibility  is  going  to  get  it  in  the  neck." 

"We  have,"  said  William  superbly,  "the  idea  of  service 
in  this  firm." 

"Man,"  said  Tom,  "if  you  hadn't  had,  I  shouldn't  be 
here  to-day  talking  to  3'ou  in  headlines.     If  you  hadn't 


THE  PEAK  IN  DARIEN  299 

had  that  idea  and  if  you  hadn't  lived  up  to  it  and  if  I 
didn't  hope  you'd  go  on  living  up  to  it,  I'd  have  had  a 
very  different  duty.  Shall  I  tell  you  what  that  duty 
would  have  been,  Sir  Rupert?  To  keep  my  mouth  shut 
and  let  you  sell.  The  higher  you  sold  the  higher  they'd 
resell  when  they  floated  their  company,  and  the  sooner 
they'd  start  squeezing  the  blood  out  of  Staithley." 

Rupert  turned  a  puzzled  face.  "That  would  have  been 
your  duty?     Why?"  he  asked. 

*'Hot  fevers  are  short,"  said  Tom.  "It  'ud  bring  the 
end  more  quickly.  I  don't  know  if  you  read  the  Times. 
If  you  do  you  may  have  seen  that  they  mentioned  my 
name  the  other  day  along  with  some  more  and  called  us 
the  elder  statesmen  of  the  Labor  Party.  Too  old  to 
hurry.  Brakes  on  the  wheels  of  progress.  Maybe;  but 
I'm  one  that  looks  for  other  roads  than  the  road  that 
leads  to  revolution  and  you  Hepplestalls  have  been  a 
sign-post  on  a  road  I  like.  You've  been  too  busy  over- 
paying yourselves  to  go  far  up  the  road  yet,  but  you're 
leaders  of  the  cotton  trade  and  by  the  Lord  that  ship 
needs  captaincy.  That's  why  I  didn't  do  what  lots  in 
the  Party  would  tell  me  was  my  duty — to  let  you  rip, 
and  rip  another  rent  in  the  rotting  fabric  of  capitalism." 

Mary's  hand  was  on  his  arm.  "Because  you  love  the 
Hepplestalls,"  she  said. 

*'And  me  a  Bradshaw?"  he  said  indignantly.  "Me  a 
Labor  Member  and  they  capital?  Did  you  ever  hear  of 
the  two  old  men  who'd  been  mortal  enemies  all  their  lives, 
and  when  one  of  them  was  killed  in  a  railway  accident, 
the  other  took  to  his  bed  and  died  because  he'd  nothing 
left  to  live  for?     That's  me  and  the  Hepplestalls." 

She  shook  her  head,  smiling.  "It's  not  like  that,"  she 
said. 

"It  ought  to  be,"  said  Tom,  "but  it  isn't.  Service,  not 
greed,  and  there's  a  hope  for  all  of  us  in  that,  and  if 


300  HEPPLESTALL'S 


jou  want  to  know  who  taught  me  to  see  it,  it  was  Sir 
Philip  Hepplestall." 

Rupert  was  in  distress.  Why  should  London,  his 
schemes,  theaters,  seem  so  incredibly  remote?  Why 
wasn't  he  angry  with  this-  grizzled  fellow  from  the  Staith- 
ley  stews  who  dared,  directly  and  indirectly,  to  lecture 
him?  Why  didn't  he  resent  Mary,  another  Bradshaw, 
who  had  brought  Tom  there  to  reprimand  a  Hepplestall? 
And  why  weren't  ladders  provided  for  climbing  down  from 
high  horses? 

"My  father?"  he  said.  "My  father  taught  you?"  It 
was  his  ancestors  he  declined  to  worship.  A  father  was 
not  an  ancestor,  and  Rupert  was  hearing  again  Sir 
Philip's  deep  sincerity  as  he  spoke  of  the  Samurai.  "We 
have  both  learned  from  Sir  Philip-,  Mr.  Bradshaw.  I  have 
been  near  to  forgetting  the  lesson.  Did  he  ever  speak  to 
you  of  Samurai?" 

*'Sam  who?"  asked  Tom. 

*'Ah,"  said  Rupert  happily.  That  was  his  secret,  that 
intimate  ideal  which  Sir  Philip  had  revealed  only  to  his 
son.  He  hadn't,  perhaps,  the  soundest  evidence  for  sup- 
posing that  the  confidence  had  been  uniquely  to  him,  but 
in  his  present  dilemma  it  seemed  entirely  satisfactory — a 
way  out  and  a  way  down.  And,  after  all,  he  came  down 
by  a  ladder. 

A  great  noise  filled  the  room,  ear-splitting,  nerve- 
jarring  to  those  who  were  not  used  to  it.  Rupert  was 
not  used  to  it,  but  for  a  moment  wondered  if  it  were  ex- 
ternal or  the  turmoil  of  his  thoughts.  "Only  the  buzzer," 
William  smiled. 

"Staithley  goes  home,"  said  Tom. 

But  not  yet.  The  Chief  Cashier  knocked  perfunctorily 
on  the  door  and  came  in  with  the  bland  air  of  one  who 
had  the  entree  at  all  times.  "If  Sir  Rupert  could  speak 
to  the  workpeople,"  he  said.     "Word  was   passed  that 


THE  PEAK  IN  DARIEN  301 

he  is  here.     This  window  looks  upon  the  yard.     May  I 
open  it?" 

Rupert  paused  for  one  of  time's  minor  fractions,  and 
his  head  jerked  as  his  father's  used  to  jerk.  "Mr.  Brad- 
shaw,"  he  said,  "will  you  step  to  the  window  with  us?" 

It  was  grand ;  it  was  too  grand ;  it  was  a  gesture  which 
began  finely  and  ran  to  seed  like  rhubarb.  It  was  florid 
when  he  wanted  to  be  simple  and  he  harked  back  in  mind 
to  a  Punch  cartoon  of  some  years  earlier,  representing 
the  Yellow  Press  as  a  horrible  person  up  to  the  knee  in 
mud,  calling  out,  "Chuck  us  another  ha'penny  and  I'll 
wallow  in  it."  He  felt  himself  up  to  the  midriff  in  a  mud 
of  sentimentality ;  for  two  pins,  he  would  with  ironic  grace 
wallow  in  the  mud.  His  surrender  was  too  loathsome  and 
insincere:  he  held  out  his  hand  to  Tom,  feeling  that  he 
was  going  the  whole  hog,  parading  his  humiliation  be- 
fore the  men  and  women  of  Hepplestall's  who  had  the 
idiotic  wish  to  salute  a  traitor  as  their  prince. 

Tom  offered  first  aid  here  and  shook  his  head.  "No, 
thanks,"  he  said.  "I've  to  be  careful  what  company  I 
keep  in  public.  I'm  Member  for  Staithley,  but  I'm  La- 
bor Member  and  you're  Capital." 

"Aren't  we  to  work  together  in  the  future?"  asked 
Rupert. 

"If  they  see  me  standing  there  with  you,  they'll  throw 
brickbats  at  me,  and  some  of  them  will  hit  you.  You've 
a  lot  to  learn.  Sir  Rupert.  Old-fashioned  Labor  men 
like  me,  that  want  to  hurry  slowly,  are  between  the  devil 
and  the  deep  sea.  If  I  show  myself  standing  by  the  devil, 
the  sea  will  come  up  and  drown  me." 

"By  George,"  said  Rupert,  feeling  half  clean  of  mud 
and  insincerity,  "by  George,  this  is  going  to  be  interest- 
ing.    I've  .   .   .   I've  a  lot  to  learn,  haven't  I?" 

"Thank  God,  you  know  it,"  said  Tom  Bradshaw  rever- 
ently. 


302  HEPPLESTALL'S 

And  in  another  minute,  Rupert  knew  it  better  still, 
when  he  moved  to  the  window  with  William.  The  fac- 
tory yard  below  them  was  packed  with  a  cheering  mass 
of  workpeople,  and  every  inlet  to  it  showed  a  sea  of  heads 
stretching  as  far  as  the  eye  could  reach.  Not  one  tenth 
the  employees  of  the  great  mills  could  stand  within  sight 
of  the  window;  those  who  were  there  had  gained  priority 
of  place  because  they  worked  in  the  departments  nearest 
the  yard,  but  not  by  any  means  all  whose  work  was  nearby 
had  come  and  it  struck  William,  if  not  Rupert,  that  the 
people  here  assembled  were  chiefly  elderly  or  very  young. 
The  elders,  like  the  gate-keeper  who  had  passed  the  word 
of  Rupert's  coming  into  the  mills,  had  genuinely  an  im- 
pulse of  loyalty  to  a  Hepplestall;  the  very  young  were 
ready  to  make  a  noise  in  a  crowd  gathered  upon  any 
occasion ;  and  the  merely  young  had  for  the  most  part 
made  no  effort  to  struggle  into  the  yard. 

To  Rupert,  this  was  Hepplestall's  making  spontaneous 
levy  in  mass  to  welcome  him ;  a  little  absurd  of  them,  even 
if  their  prince  had  been  princely,  but  undeniably  aff'ecting. 
He  must  play  up  to  these  acclamations,  he  must  say  some- 
thing gracious,  and  he  must  not  condescend.  He  was  an 
ass  whom  they  lionized,  but  he  wouldn't  bray.  He  of- 
fered to  speak,  and  the  hearty  roar  below  him  diminished. 

It  has  been  observed  before  to-day  that  the  contemp- 
tuous noise  known  as  "booing"  is  unable  to  assert  itself 
against  cheers,  whereas  a  few  sharp  hisses  cut  like  a  whip 
across  any  but  the  greatest  uproar.  As  the  cheers  di- 
minished in  anticipation  of  his  speech,  the  appearance  of 
unanimity  was  shattered  by  derisive  hissing,  drowned  at 
once  by  renewed  volume  of  cheers,  but  more  than  sufficient 
to  indicate  an  opposition. 

Behind  him  in  the  room  he  heard  Mary's  quick  "What's 
that?"  he  heard  Tom  say  "Poor  lad!  Poor  lad!"  Who 
was   a   poor   lad?     He?     He  never   did  like  honey;   he 


THE  PEAK  IN  DARIEN  303 

didn't  want  the  leadership  of  sheep  and  he  began  to  speak 
without  preamble. 

"It's  a  tremendous  thing  to  be  a  Hepplestall  and  if 
you  cheered  just  now  because  my  name  is  Hepplestall  I 
think  that  you  were  right.      Some  of  you  hissed.     If  that 
was  because  I  am  a  Hepplestall,  I  think  that  you  were 
wrong,  but  if  it  was  because  I've  been  a  long  time  in  com- 
ing here,  then  you  were  right.     I  shirked  the  responsi- 
bility.    I   had   the  thought   to   take   my   capital   out   of 
Hepplestall's  and  to  put  it  into  something  soft.     But  a 
man  said  to  me  lately  that  capital  that  failed  to  accept 
responsibility  was  going  to  get  it  in  the  neck.     I  agreed 
and  my  capital  stops  in  something  tough,  in  Hepplestall's. 
And  another  thing.     We've  made  hay  of  the  hereditary 
principle  as  such.     If  I've  no  merit,  I  shan't  presume  on 
being  Sir  Philip's  son.     In  the  mills  side  by  side  with  you, 
it  will  be  discovered  whether  I  have  merit  or  no.     Now,  I 
am  not  a  socialist.     I  shall  take  the  wages  of  capital  and 
if  I  rise  to  be  your  manager,  I  shall  take  the  wages  of 
management.     That's  blunt  and  I  expect  some  of  you  are 
taking  it  as  a  challenge.     Then  those  are  the  very  fel- 
lows  who    are    going    to   help    me    most.     We'll    arrive 
amongst  us   at  the  knowledge  of  what  is   capital's   fair 
wage  and  what  is  management's  fair  wage.     I  am  here 
to  learn  and  I  am  here  to  serve.     If  you  will  believe  that, 
it  will  help  us  all ;  it  will  help  more  than  had  I  kept  my 
motives    to    myself    and    simply    made    you   a    speech  of 
thanks  for  the  home-coming  welcome  you  have  given  me. 
The  welcome  expressed  some   disapproval  and   I   should 
not  have  been  honest  if  I  had  pretended  that   I  didn't 
notice  it.     I  am  not  out  to  earn  your  approval  by  meth- 
ods which  might  be  contrary  to  the  interests  of  Staithley 
Mills.     I  am  out  to  serve  Hepplestall's,  not  sectionally, 
but  as  a  whole.     I  look  to  you  to  show  me  my  way,  and 
while  I  have  to  thank  you  wholeheartedly  for  your  cheers. 


304  HEPPLESTALL'S 

I  am  absolutely  sincere  in  thanking  you  for  your  hisses. 
They  are  the  beginning  of  my  education.  I  haven't  a 
sweet  tooth  and  I  liked  them.  We're  not  going  to  get 
together  easily,  I  and  those  fellows  who  hissed.  Well, 
strong  bonds  aren't  forged  easily  and  I  can't  be  more 
than  a  trier.  I'm  Hepplestall  and  proud  of  it,  and  I 
dare  say  that's  enough  for  some  of  you.  It  isn't  enough 
for  me  until  I've  proved  myself  and  it  isn't  enough  for 
the  fellows  who  hissed.  I'm  asking  them  for  fair  play  for 
a  Hepplestall.  I'm  asking  for  a  chance.  I'm  going  to 
do  my  best  and  I'm  keeping  you  from  home.  It's  good 
of  you  to  stay  and  I've  said  my  say.  You've  not  had 
butter ;  you've  had  facts.  My  thanks  to  you  for  listen- 
ing.    Good  night." 

They  cheered  and  he  stood  at  the  window  as  they  dis- 
persed, trying  to  remember  what  he  had  said,  trying  to 
gauge  its  effect  upon  the  men.  There  were  no  hisses,  but 
that  meant  nothing;  a  demonstration  of  opposition  had 
been  made  and  needn't  be  repeated.  But,  an3'how,  he 
hadn't  lied ;  he  hadn't  pretended  that  he  had  their  esteem 
before  he  earned  it ;  and  he  meant  to  earn  it. 

He  tuiTied  from  the  window  to  Tom  Bradshaw;  neither 
to  Mary  nor  to  William,  but  to  Tom.  "Did  I  talk  aw- 
ful tosh?"  he  asked.  "Honestly,  I  don't  know  what  I 
said." 

"A  young  speaker  never  does,  and,  some  ways,  he's 
the  better  for  having  no  tricks  of  the  trade.  You'll  do, 
lad.     You'll  do." 

Rupert's  face  was  bright  as  he  heard  the  approbation 
of  a  Bradshaw  under  the  portrait  of  Reuben  Hepplestall. 
"Hepplestall  and  proud  of  it!     Did  I  say  that?" 

William  nodded  and  Rupert  looked  at  him  with  a  puz- 
zled face.  "Damn  it,  it's  tnie,"  he  said  wonderingly. 
*'May  I  sign  that  letter.  Uncle  William?'* 


CHAPTER  XI 


STAITHLEY    EDGE 


RUPERT  in  the  office  had  been  all  that  Mary  had 
dared  to  hope,  and  that  was  the  danger  of  it.  She 
watched  him  almost  distrusting  her  eyes  as  she  might 
have  watched  a  sudden  conversion  at  a  Salvation  Army 
meeting,  as  a  spectacle  that  was  too  fantastic  to  be  ac- 
cepted at  face  value.  She  had  an  idea  that  somebody 
suffered  when  the  penitent  reacted  from  the  emotion  of 
the  bench. 

"Always  a  catch  in  everything,"  she  had  thought  when 
she  avowed  her  origin  to  Rupert,  though  she  feared  to 
lose  him  by  the  confession,  and  now  she  was  adventuring 
again  in  skepticism,  she  was  hunting  the  catch,  the  flaw 
latent  in  human  happiness.  She  had  won  a  victory  and 
she  expected  to  pay  the  price. 

William  invited  them  to  the  Hall  and  Rupert  deferred 
to  her  with  conventional  politeness  which  seemed  to  her 
bleak  menace.  He  froze  her  by  his  courtesy  after  he  had 
so  pointedly  ignored  her  presence  except  for  the  pained 
surprise  with  which  he  had  welcomed  her,  but  she  tried 
to  believe  that  she  was  hypersensitive. 

She  had  butted  in,  into  an  affair  of  men,  and  even  if 

he  recognized  that  she  had  done  the  one  thing  possible, 

she  could  hardly  expect  him  to   applaud  her  meddling. 

Men    were    not    grateful    to    meddling    women.     Heaven 

knew  she  did  not  want  him  to  eat  the  leek  for  her ;  and 

often  there  were  understandings  which  were  better  left  un- 

305 


306  HEPPLESTALL'S 

spoken.  If  that  was  it,  if  they  were  tacitly  to  agree  that 
her  trespass  was  extreme  but  justified,  then  she  could  do 
very  well  without  more  words.  She  could  exult  in  his 
silent  approbation ;  but  silent  resentment  would  be  terrible. 
It  would  be  terrible  but  bearable :  she  was  thinking  too 
much  of  herself  and  too  little  of  him.  She  loved,  and 
what  mattered  in  love  was  not  what  one  got  out  of  it 
but  what  one  put  into  it.  By  a  treachery,  if  he  liked  to 
take  that  view  of  her  interference,  she  had  put  more  into 
her  love  than  slie  had  ever  put  before,  she  had  taken  a 
greater  risk  and  he  was  signally  the  gainer  by  it.  He 
was  going  to  Hepplestall's,  he  was  a  greater  Rupert  now. 

She  couldn't  have  it  both  ways  and  what  had  been 
wrong  in  London  was  that  he  had  loved  her  too  much, 
in  the  sense  that  he  had  spent  his  life  upon  her  and  on 
things  which  came  into  his  life  only  through  his  relation- 
ship with  her.  To  be  beautiful,  love  must  have  propor- 
tion and  his  had  grown  unshapely.  If  all  her  loss  were 
to  be  loss  of  superfluity,  her  price  of  victory  would  be 
low  indeed.  He  would  not  in  Staithley  be  the  great  lover 
he  had  been  in  London,  but  there  was  double  edge  to 
that  phrase  "great  lover" :  the  great  lovers  were  too  often 
the  little  men.  Certainly  and  healthily  he  would  love  her 
less  uxoriously  now,  and  that  must  be  all  to  the  good. 

All,  even  if  he  loved  her  no  more.  That  was  the  risk 
she  had  taken  with  open  eyes,  and  love  her  sanely  or  love 
her  not  at  all,  he  had  come  to  Hepplestall's:  Rupert  the 
man  was  of  more  importance  than  Rupert  the  husband. 
And  the  right  man  would  not  cease  to  love  her  because  she 
had  gone  crusading  for  his  soul  under  the  banner  of  a 
Bradshaw. 

She  saw  that  she  had  come  round  to  optimism  and 
found  herself  in  such  a  port  with  a  thousand  new  alarms. 
She  was  crying  safety  when  there  was  no  safety,  she  .  .  . 

Rupert  and  William  were  talking  and  she  had  not  been 


STAITHLEY  EDGE  307 

listening.  She  must  have  missed  clews  to  Rupert's 
thought  and  forced  herself  to  hear.  It  didn't  sound  re- 
vealing talk,  though.  Lightly — and  how  could  they  be 
light? — they  were  chaffing  each  other  about  their  cars. 

"I'll  prove  it  to  you  now,"  William  was  saying.  "We'll 
garage  your  crock  here  and  I'll  drive  you  up  to  the  Hall 
in  a  car  that  is  a  car." 

"No,  thanks,"  said  Rupert,  "I've  something  to  do  first, 
with  Mary.  We'll  follow  you  soon.  I  dare  say  my  aunt 
won't  be  sorry  to  have  warning  of  our  coming." 

William's  face  fell.  Gertrude  could  make  herself  un- 
pleasant when  she  did  not  get  her  way,  and  this  time  her 
hopes  had  gone  sadly  agley.  He  would  have  liked  a  body- 
guard when  he  announced  to  her  that  Rupert  was  com- 
ing to  Staithley.     "I  had  hoped — "  he  began. 

Rupert  nodded  curtly.  "Yes,"  he  said,  surprising 
William  by  a  look  which  seemed  strangely  to  comprehend 
his  dilemma,  "but  we  shall  not  be  long." 

Mary  thrilled  through  all  preoccupation  to  the  heady 
thought  that  a  Bradshaw  was  to  dine  at  Staithley  Hall, 
but  her  way  there  was  not,  it  seemed,  to  be  an  easy  one. 
Rupert  chose,  she  supposed,  to  have  things  out  with  her 
first,  and  if  she  did  not  relish  the  anticipation,  she  could 
admire  his  promptitude.  He  had  an  air  of  grim  gayety 
which  mystified  by  its  contradiction,  but  of  which  the 
grimness  seemed  addressed  to  William  and  the  gayety  to 
her. 

"Got  any  luggage?"  he  asked  her.  She  had  quitted 
Staithley  with  a  suitcase ;  she  returned  with  no  more  out- 
ward show  of  possession,  and  they  picked  up  her  case  in 
the  ante-room  where  she  had  left  it  as  they  passed  through 
to  get  the  car. 

"Well,  Mary  Ellen,"  he  said,  using  her  full  name  which 
certainly  was  normal  in  Lancashire  where  the  Mary  El- 
lens and  the  John  Thomases  are  almost  double-barreled 


308  HEPPLESTALL'S 

names,  "this  is  Staithley.     How  well  do  you  remember  it? 
Is  there  a  road  round  the  mills?" 

"I  think  so,"  she  said,  "but  you'll  meet  cobbles.'* 
"It's  Staithley,"  he  said,  and  drove  the  circuit  of  the 
mills  in  silence.  "Um,"  he  said.  "London.  Furthest 
East,  which  is  the  Aldwych  Theater,  to  Furthest  West, 
which  is  the  St.  James,  to  Furthest  North,  which  is  the 
Oxford,  and  back  East  by  Drury  Lane.  We've  driven 
further  than  that  round  these  mills.  Somebody  once 
mentioned  to  me  that  they're  big.  There's  a  coal  mine, 
too,  that's  a  bit  of  detail  nobody  bothers  to  think  of. 
Well,  is  there  any  way  of  looking  down  on  this  village.'"' 
"There's  Staithley  Edge,"  she  said.  "There's  a  road 
up  by  the  Drill  Hall." 

"Point  it  out,"  he  said.  "You  understand  that  we're 
doing  this  to  give  Aunt  Gertrude  time  to  powder  her 
nose.     It  isn't  really  a  waste  of  petrol." 

Whatever  it  was,  and  certainly  she  found  no  harsh  re- 
actions here,  they  were  doing  it  in  the  dark  which  fell  like 
a  benediction  on  Staithley.  Their  wheels  churned  up  rich 
mud  of  the  consistency,  since  for  days  it  had  been  fine, 
of  suet  pudding,  and  the  road,  worn  by  the  heavy  traffic 
of  the  mills,  bumped  them  inexorably.  "Staithley!"  he 
said.  "Staithley!"  but  she  did  not  detect  contempt. 
They  reached  the  Drill  Hall  and  the  Square,  unchanged 
except  by  a  War  Memorial  and  a  cinema,  and  turned  into 
the  street  up  which  she  had  once  gazed  while  Mr.  Chown 
waited,  ill-lighted,  ill-paved,  a  somber  channel  between  two 
scrubby  rows  of  deadly  uniform  houses.  "Staithley  goes 
home,"  Tom  Bradshaw  had  said,  and  this  was  where  an 
appreciable  percentage  of  it  had  gone ;  but  neither  Rupert 
nor  Mary  were  being  sociological  now.  She  did  not  know 
what  he  was  thinking;  she  thought  of  Staithley  Edge  and 
of  the  moors  beyond,  wondering  a  little  why  she  should 


STAITHLEY  EDGE  309 

find  Staithley  so  good  when  it  was  so  good  to  get  out  of 
it  up  here. 

A  tang  of  burning  peat  assailed  her  nostrils,  indicating 
that  they  had  reached  the  height  where  peat  from  the 
moors  cost  less  than  coal  from  the  pits,  and  soon  the 
upland  air  blew  coolly  in  their  faces  as  they  left  the  top- 
most house  behind.  The  road  led" on,  over  the  hill,  across 
the  moor  which  showed  no  signs,  in  the  darkness,  of  men's 
ravaging  handiwork,  but  at  the  first  rise  Rupert  stopped 
the  car  and  got  out. 

"So  that's  it."  He  looked  on  Staithley,  where  the 
streets,  outlined  by  their  lamps,  seemed  to  lead  resolutely 
to  an  end  which  was  nothing.  It  was  not  nothing ;  it  was 
the  vast  bulk  of  Staitliley  Mills,  unlighted  save  for  a 
glimmer  here  and  there,  but  possibly  he  was  seeing  in 
these  human  roadways  which  debouched  on  that  black  in- 
human nullity,  a  symbol  of  futility.  The  gayety  seemed 
gone  from  him  like  air  from  a  punctured  balloon,  as  he 
said  again,  in  a  dejected  voice,  "So  that's  it.  That  pool 
of  darkness.     They're  a  great  size,  the  Staithley  Mills." 

She  was  out  of  the  car  and  at  his  elbow  as  she  said, 
"A  man's  size  in  jobs,  Rupert." 

"Or  in  prisons,"  he  said  bitterly. 

"Prisons !"  And  she  had  been  feeling  so  secure !  Here 
was  sheer  miracle — she  and  Rupert  were  standing  to- 
gether on  Staithley  Edge ;  they  were  in  her  land  of  heart's 
desire,  and  the  Edge,  her  Mecca,  was  betraying  her,  the 
miracle  was  declining  to  be  miraculous.  "Prisons !"  she 
said,  in  an  agony  of  disillusionment. 

"Oh,  aren't  we  all  in  prison?"  he  asked.  "The  larger, 
the  smaller — does  it  matter?" 

This  was  philosophy,  and  Mary  wanted  the  practicali- 
ties. "Are  you  seeing  me  as  jailer?  Is  that  what  you 
mean?" 


310  HEPPLESTALL'S 


«i 


'Resenting  you?"  he  asked.  "You!"  and  left  it  so 
with  luminous  emphasis.  "No.  Life's  the  jailer.  For 
four  years  I  was  every  day  afraid  of  death.  I'm  afraid 
of  life  to-night.  What  shall  I  make  of  Staithley?  Those 
mills,  to  which  each  Hepplestall  since  the  first  who  built 
there  has  added  something  great.  Those  milestones  of 
my  race.  I  meant  to  run  away,  I  meant  to  dodge  and 
shirk  and  make  belief.  You've  steered  me  back  and  I 
thank  you  for  it,  Mary.  But  it's  a  mouthful  that  I've 
bitten  off.  Hepplestall's !  What  shall  I  add?  I  don't 
know.     I'm  overpowered.     It's  so  solemn.     It's  so  big." 

*'You're  big,  Rupert." 

He  seemed*  not  to  hear  or  to  feel  her  hand  on  his. 
"  'On  me,  ultimately  on  me  alone  rests  the  responsibility.* 
That  is  what  my  father,  who  was  Head  of  Hepplestall's, 
said  to  me.  Look  at  those  mills,  then  look  at  me. 
They're  big.     They're  terrifying  in  their  bigness." 

"No.     Worth  while  in  their  bigness.'* 

"I  don't  know  what  you  were  thinking  as  we  drove 
round  the  mills.  I  was  wondering,"  he  smiled  a  little,  "if 
they  speak  of  a  cliff  as  beetling  because  it  makes  one  feel 
the  size  of  a  beetle  under  it.  And  I  thought  of  a  machine 
I  remembered  seeing  in  the  works  that  they  call  a  beetle. 
It's  got  great  rollers  with  weights  that  clump  and  thump 
the  cloth  till  it  shines  and  the  noise  of  it  splits  your  ears. 
Each  huge  wall  of  the  mills,  God  knows  how  many  stories 
high,  seemed  to  fall  on  me  like  so  many  successive  blows 
from  a  beetling  machine.  I  was  under  Hepplestall's,  as 
people  talk  of  being  under  the  weather,  and  it's  always 
Hepplestall's  weather  in  Staithley.  I  wasn't  lying  when 
I  spoke  to  those  fellows  in  the  yard,  I  had  some  confidence 
then,  but  it's  oozed,  it's  oozed.     Look  at  the  size  of  it  all.'* 

"I'm  looking,"  said  Mary,  "and  from  Staithley  Edge 
it's  in  perspective.  Rupert,  this  air  up  here!  I'm  not 
afraid.     Not    here.     Not    now.     You  .  .  .  you've    got 


STAITHLEY  EDGE  311 

growing  pains,  and  they  say  they're  imaginary,  but  I 
know  they're  good.  You're  a  bigger  man  already  than 
you  were." 

"I'm  a  hefty  brute  for  a  growing  child,"  he  smiled  down 
at  her. 

"You  can  take  it  smiling,  though,"  she  approved. 

**It's  this  modern  flippancy,"  he  grinned.  "A  genera- 
tion of  scoffers.  But  you  can't  get  over  Hepplestall's 
by  scoffing  at  it.  I  came  up  here  to  look  down  on  it, 
and  I'm  only  more  aware  than  ever  that  it's  big.  You — 
you've  got  your  idea  of  me.  It's  a  nice  idea,  but  it's  pure 
flattery." 

"No." 

"Oh,  yes,  it  is,  to-day.  But  it's  something  to  grow  up 
to,  and  it's  worth  while  because  it's  your  idea.  If  this 
family  gang  of  mine  told  me  they  believed  in  me  I  should 
know  they  were  talking  through  their  hats.  They 
wouldn't  be  believing  in  me,  they'd  be  believing  in  who  I 
am,  they'd  be  believing  in  a  tradition  which  declares  that 
ray  father's  son  must  be  up  to  standard.  You're  dif- 
ferent. You  know  me  and  they  don't,  and  you've  brought 
me  to  Staithley.  It's  your  doing,  and  I  want  like  hell 
not  to  let  you  down.  Your  idea  of  me's  not  true.  It's 
too  good  to  be  true.     But  I  mean  to  make  it  true." 

Mary  looked  uphill  to  where,  a  hundred  feet  above 
them,  the  darkling  rim  of  the  Edge  was  silhouetted  against 
the  sky.  "Staithley  Edge,"  she  said,  "and  in  my  mind  I 
was  calling  you  a  cheat."  She  stooped  to  the  bank  by 
the  road,  she  plucked  coarse  grass  and  held  it  to  her  lips. 
"Staithley  Edge,  will  you  forgive  me?  The  dreams  I've 
had  of  you,  and  then  the  shameful  doubts  and  now  the 
better  than  all  dreaming  that  this  is.  I  was  going  to 
build  a  house  on  Staithley  Edge,  and  I  have  built  a  man.'* 

"Of  course,"  said  Rupert,  "I  knew  you  had  a  passion 
for  hills." 


312  HEPPLESTALL'S 

"I  never  told  jou,"  Mary  said. 

"No.  But  I  knew.  This  is  a  hill.  It  isn't  an  Alp. 
It  isn't  a  mountain.  It's  Staithley  Edge.  I  wonder  what 
they're  doing  about  houses  in  Staithley.  I  don't  want  to 
rob  any  one,  but  I'd  like  a  house  up  here." 

"Rupert!"  she  cried. 

*'It's  Aunt  Gertrude,  you  know,"  he  seemed  to  apolo- 
gize. "Poor  old  thing,  she's  got  the  same  bee  in  her 
bonnet  that  her  nephew  used  to  have.  London.  Well, 
William's  the  Head  and  he  ought  to  go  on  at  the  Hall, 
and  if  he  does  it  should  pacify  Gertrude.  I  expect  he's 
going  through  it  while  we're  loafing  up  here.  Shall  we 
go  and  break  the  news  to  her  that  there's  no  eviction  on 
the  program?" 

"Oh,  my  dear,  there  are  a  thousand  things  we  haven't 
said." 

"There's  the  point,  for  instance,  that  if  I  look  down  on 
Staithley  Mills  every  morning  from  my  bedroom  I  ought 
to  feel  less  scared  of  them." 

"I  don't  believe  a  word  of  it,"  said  Mary  and,  kissing 
him,  some  hundreds  of  the  things  they  hadn't  said  seemed 
lustrously  expressed.  She  found  no  insincerities  in  him 
now ;  the  gesture  and  the  bravado  and  the  air  that  it  was 
all  something  he  was  doing  for  a  wager — these  had  gone 
and  in  their  place  was  his  task  acknowledged  and  ap- 
proached with  humility.  It  was  a  beginning  and  she 
thought  so  well  of  his  beginning  that  she  had  time  to 
think  of  herself. 

He  turned  the  car  towards  the  Hall,  and  the  thought 
that  she  was  going  there  was  no  longer  heady.  He  had 
spoken  contemptuously  of  "this  family  gang";  he  had 
said,  and  she  adored  him  for  it,  that  she  was  different. 
They  had,  perhaps,  some  comfort  for  Gertrude ;  they  were 
going  to  her  with  a  message  which  should  reconcile  her 
to  the  news  she  would  have  heard  from  William ;  but,  for 


STAITHLEY  EDGE  313 

all  that,  Mary  was  daunted  at  her  coming  encounter  with 
Gertrude  Hepplestall. 

"Rupert,"  she  said,  "you  must  help  me  to-night.  Your 
aunt,  and  all  the  Hepplestalls,  your  family — and  me." 

He  frowned.     "Well?"  he  said. 

"There's  the  tradition,  and  you  married  me.  You  mar- 
ried into  musical  comedy." 

"Hasn't  it  dawned  on  you  that  you're  my  wife,  Mary  ?" 
But  that  was  precisely  what  had  dawned  upon  her  and 
his  question  made  her  wonder  if  he  saw  what  was  implied. 
In  London,  he  was  all  but  explicitly  the  husband  of  Mary 
Arden;  in  Staithley  she  was  no  longer  Mary  Arden,  she 
was  the  wife  of  Sir  Rupert  Hepplestall.  That  might  not 
mean  that  the  foundations  of  their  relationship  had 
shifted,  but  it  certainly  meant  a  vital  difference  in  its 
values  above  the  surface.  She  was  Cassar's  wife  and  peo- 
ple ought  not  to  be  able  to  remember  against  Csesar  that 
he  had  married  an  actress. 

"Yes,  your  wife,  Rupert.  Your  wife  who  was  an 
actress." 

"Are  you  making  the  suggestion  that  you  are  some- 
thing to  be  ashamed  of?" 

"I've  the  conceit  to  believe  I'm  not.  You  love  me  and 
I've  the  right  to  be  conceited.  But  it  isn't  what  I  think 
of  myself,  it's  what  Staithley  will  think  of  me.  London's 
inured  to  actresses.     Staithley — " 

"Excuse  an  interruption,"  he  said,  *'but  If  you  want 
to  know  what  Staithley  will  think  to-morrow,  look  there." 
He  slowed  the  car  and  pointed  to  the  cinema  across  the 
Square.  A  man  on  a  ladder  was  hand-printing  in  large 
letters  on  a  white  sheet  above  the  door  "Tomorrow. 
Mary  Arden  in  .  .  ." 

"That's  enterprise,  isn't  it?  The  fellow  can't  have 
heard  more  than  half  an  hour  ago  that  I  was  here,  then 
he'd  to  think  of  you  and  he  must  have  been  busy  on  the 


314.  HEPPLESTALL'S 

'phone  to  have  made  sure  of  getting  that  film  here  to- 
morrow." 

"Rupert,  how  awful  for  you.  They  will  never  forget 
what  I  was  now." 

"Never.     Thank  God." 

"Don't  you  care?" 

"Oh,  yes,  I  care  and  if  I  cared  cheaply,  I  should  thank 
you  for  being  my  propagandist.  I  should  thank  you  for 
making  me  popular  because  you  are  popular  and  I'm 
your  husband.  You  can't  deny  there's  that  in  it,  Mary, 
but  there's  more.  There's  the  bridging  of  a  gulf. 
There's  a  breach  made  in  a  bad  tradition.  We  Hepple- 
stalls  must  drop  being  Olympian.  Aloofness;  that's  to 
go  and  it'll  get  a  shove  when  Lady  Hepplestall  is  seen  on 
the  screen  in  Staithley.  What  do  a  thousand  Gertrudes 
matter  if  we  can  bridge  the  gulf.'*  We've  got  to  get  to- 
gether, we've  got  to  reach  those  men  who  hissed.  Do  you 
see  that  cinema  as  a  cheap  way?  I  don't.  It's  a  modern 
way  if  you  like  and  it  isn't  a  way  I  made  but  one  you 
made  for  me.  It's  a  reach-me-down,  and  I  shan't  stop  at 
ways  that  are  ready-made.  I'll  find  my  own.  Up  on 
the  Edge  I  asked  what  I  would  add  to  Hepplestall's. 
I'll  add  this  if  I  can — I'll  add  humanity." 

"And  I  can  help.     Music,  for  instance.'* 

"You'll  make  me  jealous  soon.  You  have  so  many  ad- 
vantages of  me.  I'm  not  even  sure  if  I'm  good  enough 
for  Lancashire  League  cricket.  It's  good  stuff,  I  can 
tell  you.     Whereas  you  .  .  ." 

"Am  I  to  manage  Staithley  Mills?" 

"Nor  I,  for  years.  Never,  if  I'm  unequal  to  it.  But 
you're  right.  The  mills  are  the  important  thing,  the 
rest's  decoration  and  decoration  won't  go  far.  Staithley 
won't  stand  you  and  me  as  Lady  and  Lord  Bountiful. 
Those  hissing  friends  of  ours — circuses  won't  satisfy  them 
and  I'd  think  the  worse  of  them  if  they  would.     I'll  talk 


STAITHLEY  EDGE  315 

to  William  to-night  and  I  expect  he'll  snap  my  head  off. 
He's  of  the  old  gang,  William  is.  There's  the  war  be- 
tween William  and  me,  but,  Lord,  he'll  know,  he'll  know 
it  all  and  I  know  nothing.     I'm  so  young." 

"Yes,"  said  Mary,  "and  you'll  stay  young,  please. 
You'll  keep  your  hope,  my  faith,  your  youth." 

"I'm  young  all  right,"  he  said.  "Listen  to  me  if  you 
doubt  it.  *I'll  add  humanity.'  Did  I  say  that?  With 
a  voice  beautifully  vibrant  with  earnestness?  Young 
enough  to  be  capable  of  anything.  But  I  will  add  it," 
he  finished  as  he  drew  up  at  the  door  of  the  Hall. 

Hope  burnished  them  as  they  came  into  the  old  home 
of  the  Hepplestalls ;  they  were  the  keepers  of  a  great  light 
lit  on  Staithley  Edge;  they  had  a  radiance  which  seemed 
to  Gertrude  a  personal  affront  to  her  chatelainship. 
They  came  with  the  insolence  of  conquerors  into  the 
somber  scene  of  her  defeat,  but  she  was  on  guard  against 
revealing  her  feelings  to  the  actress  woman  who  was  Lady 
Hepplestall.  She  had  failed,  she  was  doomed  to  Staith- 
ley, she  had  to  explain  away  to  her  friend  the  letter  she 
had  written  announcing  that  she  was  coming  to  live  in 
London,  she  was  to  be  evicted  from  the  Hall  by  a  saucy 
baggage  out  of  a  musical  comedy ;  but  even  if  the  baggage 
proved  as  bad  as  her  worst  anticipations  she  would  not 
lower  to  her  by  the  fraction  of  an  inch  her  flag  of  reso- 
lutely suave  politeness. 

She  went  upstairs  to  change  her  face  after  a  tempestu- 
ous interview  with  William,  and,  expectant  of  a  Mary 
strident  in  jazz  coloring,  changed  also  her  frock  to  a 
sedate  gray  which  should  contrast  the  lady  with  the  Lady. 
Then  Mary  came,  with  hair  wind-tossed,  and  round  her 
lips  were  marks  as  if  she  were  a  child  sticky  with  toffee 
(but  that  was  because  when  you  pluck  grass  on  Staithley 
Edge  and  press  it  to  your  cheek  and  kiss  it,  it  leaves  be- 
hind traces  of  the  smoky  livery  it  wears),  apologizing  for 


316  HEPPLESTALL'S 

her  plain  traveling  dress,  looking  so  unlike  Gertrude's 
idea  of  the  beauty-chorus  queen  who  had  captured  Rupert 
that  immediately  she  was  off  on  a  new  trail  and  saw  in 
Mary  a  tool  made  for  her  through  which  to  work  on 
Rupert  and  after  all  to  bring  about  the  sale  of  Hepple- 
stall's.  She  could  manage  this  smudge-faced  piece  of  in- 
significance and  she  could  manage  a  Rupert  who  had  been 
caught  by  it.  Her  spirits  rose,  and  their  happiness 
seemed  to  her  no  longer  offensive  but  imbecile. 

Later  on,  she  wondered  why  she  forgot  that  the  busi- 
ness of  an  actress  was  to  act.  She  meditated  ruefully 
upon  the  vanity  of  human  hopes  and  the  fallibility  of  first 
impressions,  and  she  had  no  doubt  but  that  Mary,  for 
some  dark  purpose  of  her  own,  had  counterfeited  insig- 
nificance. 

Mary  hadn't,  as  a  fact,  acted,  but  she  had  thought  of 
Mary  Ellen  Bradshaw  and  of  Jackman's  Buildings  and 
Staithley  streets  as  the  door  of  the  Hall  opened  to  her, 
and  she  had  continued  to  think  of  Mary  Ellen  Bradshaw 
through  the  few  moments  when  Gertrude  was  greeting 
Her.  She  didn't  know  that  the  mourning  grass  of  Staith- 
ley Edge  had  left  its  mark  on  her  face ;  if  she  had  known, 
she  would  have  felt  more  insignificant  still,  but  she  had 
washed  since  then,  she  had  kissed  Rupert  in  their  bedroom 
in  Staithley  Hall  and  her  effect  now  upon  Gertrude  was 
that  of  the  bottle  marked  "Drink  me"  upon  Alice  in  Won- 
derland. Gertrude  had  drunk  of  no  magic  bottle,  but  she 
dwindled  before  Mary.  It  was  disconcerting  to  an  in- 
triguer who  had  so  lately  seen  Mary  as  her  pliant  instru- 
ment, but  "Pooh !  some  actress  trick,"  she  thought,  mak- 
ing an  effort  to  believe  that  she  dominated  the  table. 

"I'm  afraid  you  will  find  Staithley  very  dull,"  she  said, 
"but  we  shall  all  do  our  best  for  you." 

"Thank  you,"  said  Mary.     "It's  exciting  so  far." 

"Yes.     It  must  be  strangely  novel  to  you.     Of  course. 


STAITHLEY  EDGE  317 

I  never  go  into  the  town.     One  needn't,  living  in  the  Hall ; 
but  I'm  forgetting.     I  shan't  be  living  here." 

"Oh,  you  will,  aunt,"  said  Rupert.  "We  went  up  on 
the  Edge  to  have  a  look  at  it  all,  and  we  decided — it  arose 
out  of  a  suggestion  of  Mary's — to  build  a  house  up  there. 
You  see,  uncle,  you're  the  Head.  The  Hall  is  naturally 
yours  and  aunt's." 

"Naturally?  It's  your  property,  Rupert.'* 
"Then  that  settles  it.  We'll  get  some  one  to  run  us 
up  a  cottage  on  the  Edge  quite  quickly.  Really  a  cot- 
tage, I  mean.  I  shall  be  working  as  a  workman  and  I 
ought  to  live  as  one.  I  shan't  do  that,  but  it  won't  be  a 
mansion  pretending  to  be  a  cottage." 

"Well !"  said  Gertrude.     "A  cottage  on  the  Edge  !'* 
"We  have  to  grow,  Rupert  and  I,"  said  Mary.     "We 
aren't  big  enough  for  the  Hall  yet." 

"I  feel  about  a  quarter  of  an  inch  high,  uncle,  when  I 
think  of  those  mills  .  .  .  those  thousands  of  men." 

"Oh,  the  workpeople,"  said  Gertrude,  putting  them  in 
their  place.  "Your  uncle  tells  me  some  of  them  dared  to 
hiss." 

"Yes,  I  want  to  talk  to  you  about  that,  uncle." 
William  shuffled  in  his  chair.     "Not  very  nice  of  them, 
was  it?" 

"Impertinents,"  said  Gertrude.  "They  ought  to  be 
locked  up." 

Rupert  stared  at  her.  If  this  was  the  attitude  of  the 
Hall,  he  thought,  no  wonder  there  had  been  a  show  of 
resentment.  But  it  was  only  Gertrude's  attitude. 
"Would  you  also  lock  up,"  said  William,  "the  very  many 
who  did  a  deadlier  thing  than  hissing?  The  men  who 
stayed  away,  the  men  who  went  home  ignoring  Rupert 
altogether?  We'd  have  to  close  the  mills  for  lack  of 
labor." 

"Lord,"  said  Rupert,  "that's  telling  me  something." 


31 8  HEPPLESTALL'S 

"I  thought  it  best  that  you  should  know." 

Rupert  thought  ho  too,  even  if  it  was  a  piece  of  knowl- 
edge which  seemed  to  bring  him  off  a  high  place  with  a 
bump. 

"Oh,  my  dears,"  Gertrude  put  in,  "you've  no  idea  how 
difficult  it  all  is." 

"No,"  said  Mary,  "but  Rupert  knows  that  he  knows 
nothing  and  he's  here  to  learn." 

"Yes.  I'm  here  to  learn.  Can  you  put  your  finger  on 
this  for  me,  uncle?  Why  did  they  hiss?  \Vliy  did  they 
stay  away?" 

"What  do  you  expect  from  a  pig  but  a  grunt?'*  asked. 
Gertrude. 

"It's  to  be  noted,  Rupert,"  said  William,  "that  the 
hisses  came  before  you  spoke,  not  afterwards." 

*'You  mean  I  said  the  right  thing?" 

*'Did  you  mean  what  you  said?  Look  at  those  books 
over  there."  Behind  the  glass  of  the  old  mahogany  case 
to  which  he  pointed,  the  titles  looked  queerly  incongruous. 
There  were  books  on  such  subjects  as  Welfare  Societies, 
Works  Committees,  Co-Partnership,  and  Rupert  thought 
them  incongruous  not  only  in  connection  with  that  book- 
case but  with  William. 

"People  have  sent  them  to  3'ou?"  he  guessed. 

"No.  I  bought  them.  If  in  the  short  years  that  IVe 
been  Head  I  have  left  my  mark  on  Hepplestall's,  it  is  in 
this  direction.  Your  father,  as  perhaps  you  know,  was 
against  what  he  called  coddling  the  men.  I  would  not 
coddle,  but  I  have  encouraged  Welfare  Societies  and  I 
have  instituted  Works  Committees." 

Rupert  had  the  sensation  of  deflation.  He  had  called 
William  of  "the  old  gang,"  and  here  was  William's  con- 
tribution to  the  march  of  Hepplestall's.  Rupert  was  to 
add  humanity,  was  he?  Well,  William  had  added  it  first. 
"I  did  these  things  with  hope,"  William  was  saying.     "I 


STAITHLEY  EDGE  319 

pinned  my  faith  to  them,  and  what  are  thev  worth? 
There  were  two  Hopplestalls  hissed  in  Staithley  Mills  to- 
day. That  is  the  reply  to  what  I  have  tried  to  do.  Can 
you  wonder  that  I  feel  I've  shot  my  bolt  and  missed  my 
aim?  The  detail  of  my  Works  Committees  scheme  took 
me  a  year  to  evolve.  I  thought  it  was  accepted  and  wel- 
comed ;  and  I  was  hissed  to-day  in  Staithley  Mills." 

For  a  moment  even  Mary  was  daunted,  not  by  the  thing 
she  had  brought  Rupert  here  to  do  but  by  the  realization 
of  what  release  had  meant  to  William. 

"Not  you,  uncle,"  Rupert  cried.  "They  hissed  me  for 
being  a  laggard." 

"We're  Hepplestalls.  That's  why  they  hissed.  They 
hissed  the  Service." 

It  had  seemed  solemn  enough  on  Staithley  Edge,  but 
that  was  childish  levity  compared  with  this.  What  should 
one  answer  back  to  men  who  hissed  the  Service  which 
served  them?  Gertrude's  pig  with  a  grunt  seemed  justi- 
fied in  the  light  of  William's  revelation  of  his  progressive 
efforts. 

"And  you,"  William  said,  "you  spoke,  and  they  cheered 
you  for  it.  Well,  it's  in  those  books.  Co-Partnership. 
No:  I've  not  done  that.  Limitation  of  profits — I've 
thought  the  Government  was  doing  that  drastically.  I 
don't  know.  You  went  too  far  for  me,  but  they  didn't 
hiss  you  when  you'd  done.  You  say  you're  here  to  learn. 
Well,  I  can't  teach  you.  The  technical  side  and  the 
ordinary  business  side — oh,  yes,  we'll  teach  you  those. 
But  what  Labor  wants,  what,  short  of  something  catas- 
trophic on  the  Russian  scale,  ^nll  satisfy  Labor,  I  can- 
not tell  you  for  I  do  not  know." 

Once,  unimaginably  long  ago,  Rupert  had  found  the 
beginnings  of  a  solution  in  his  wife's  appearance  on  the 
screen  in  a  Staitlilev  cinema.  It  was  so  loner  affo  that 
he  thought  he  must  have  grown  stupendousl}'  since  then. 


320  HEPPLESTALL'S 

Perhaps  he  had;  it  was  a  far  cry  from  that  uninformed 
optimism  to  this  throttling  doubt. 

The  doubt,  though,  was  almost  as  uninformed  as  the 
optimism.  He  could  see  Mary's  lips  moving:  what  was 
she  signaling  to  him?  Ah,  that  was  it.  She  was  re- 
peating what  she  had  said  as  they  turned  up  the  drive. 
"You'll  stay  young,  please.  You'll  keep  your  hope,  my 
faith,  your  youth." 

Yes,  so  he  would.  He  wouldn't  let  Mary  down,  he 
wouldn't  be  beaten  by  Staitliley.  Punch — queer  how 
much  he  turned  to  memories  of  Punch  for  mental  figures — 
had  a  cartoon  in  an  Almanac  during  the  war.  A  tattered 
soldier,  beaten  to  the  knee,  represented  one  year;  a  fresh 
upstanding  soldier,  taking  the  standard  from  the  first, 
represented  the  next  year.  Was  the  motto  "Carry  on".?* 
Well,  a  good  motto  for  peace  too.  William  was  coming 
to  the  end  of  his  tether,  and  Rupert  must  make  ready  to 
take  from  his  hands  the  standard  of  the  Service. 

He  had  to  learn,  to  learn,  and  for  this  thing  which 
mattered  most  he  had  not  found  a  teacher,  but  he  must 
keep  his  hope.  Somewhere  was  light.  Somewhere  was 
illumination.     Somewhere  was  a  teacher. 

A  servant  came  into  the  room.  "Mr.  Bradshaw  wishes 
to  speak  to  Sir  Rupert  on  the  telephone,"  he  said,  and  a 
scoffing  laugh  from  Gertrude  died  stillborn  at  a  look  from 
the  ci-devant,  insignificant  Lady  Hepplestall.  Rupert 
went  to  the  door,  like  a  blind  man  who  is  promised  sight; 
and  it  is  permissible  to  hope  that  Phoebe  Bradshaw,  from 
the  place  in  which  she  was,  saw  the  face  of  Rupert  Hep- 
plestall as  he  answered  the  call  to  the  telephone  of  Tom 
Bradshaw,  his  adviser. 


THE  END 


Date  Due 

f) 

•rrtm  the? 


UC  SOUTHERN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACILIT 


AA    000  602  904    5 


